In India, 288 people died and more than 800 were injured on Friday evening in one of the worst train accidents in the country in two decades. The clash took place near the city of Balasore in the state of Orissa in eastern India. Indian authorities confirmed that three trains were involved in the accident: two passenger trains and one freight train.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived on Saturday and visited the crash site and hospitals. Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said a thorough investigation will be made into the incident, while the opposition has called for his resignation.
The accident occurred when the Coromandel Express, a train traveling from Calcutta in West Bengal to Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu, traveling at around 130 kilometers per hour collided with a freight train which was stationary in a small station where the passenger train was not supposed to stop. The freight train and the passenger train, going off the tracks, derailed another passenger train going in the opposite direction, the Howrah Superfast Express. In all there were about 2,000 people on the trains: survivors said there were hundreds of workers and students traveling standing up against each other.
The reason for the first collision is not yet clear, i.e. why the passenger train was not aware of the presence of a freight train stationary on the tracks. A hypothesis put forward by the Indian authorities is that there has been a communication error due to a failure to transmit signals.
The scene of the accident during the operations to free the tracks (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
Throughout Saturday, ambulances, cars, tractors, doctors, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, rescuers, sniffer dogs arrived at the scene to pull out bodies and people who were trapped. Thousands of inhabitants of the nearby areas rushed after hearing the very loud noise of the trains braking and then colliding, to help in the rescue operations and in some cases to take away luggage or other valuables left unattended, as reported by some injured people.
Hospitals and doctors in the region struggled to accommodate the hundreds of wounded who arrived at the same time and many residents went to donate blood to meet the sudden need for large quantities. The operations ended on Saturday evening: the remains of the trains were removed and the railway staff freed the rails to ensure that railway traffic could resume. According to the authorities, about 200 bodies remain to be identified, which have been temporarily placed inside a school and an industrial facility nearby.
A group of people look for their loved ones among the bodies of people who died in the accident (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
Modi proclaimed Saturday a day of national mourning and said that the equivalent of about 11,000 euros will be given to the family of every person who died. Friday’s train crash was the deadliest since 1995, when more than 350 people were killed when two trains collided just outside New Delhi.
India’s railway network is one of the largest in the world, with a total of 65,000 km of track. The issue of safety has been at the center of Indian political debate for years: in 2012 a commission recommended a series of urgent measures to make rail transport safer, such as the replacement and maintenance of trains and rails and infrastructure works. In recent times, Modi’s government has invested billions of euros in the railway system and in the last two years, for the first time in the country’s recent history, no people had died in railway accidents.
