Amid overturned wagons, rescuers are working tirelessly in eastern India to extract survivors from the wreckage caused by a collision between three three on Friday evening. Many corpses were covered in white shrouds lying next to the tracks at the scene of the tragedy, near Balasore, about 200 kilometers from Bhubaneswar, the capital of the state of Odisha. Odisha State Fire Service Director General Sudhanshu Sarangi told AFP that the death toll has reached 288. “Relief operations continue on the spot, and they will not be finished for several hours,” he added.
A senior representative of the regional government, Pradeep Jena, for his part said that around 850 people had been hospitalized. A relentless parade of ambulances dropped off injured people at Bhadrak district hospital overnight, where the bloodied and shocked survivors are being treated in overcrowded conditions.
Trapped under heaps of scrap metal
According to Amitabh Sharma, the director of Indian Railways, two passenger trains were “actively involved in the accident”. A third train, a freight convoy, was parked at the site where the tragedy occurred, he told AFP without providing further details. “The number of casualties on the ground or injured is very difficult to assess at the moment,” said Amitabh Sharma, as many passengers likely remain trapped in the rubble.
A survivor told reporters he was asleep when the crash happened, and awoke to find himself under a dozen other passengers, before crawling out of his compartment with injuries to his chest. neck and arm. “We have prepared all major public and private hospitals, from the crash site to the state capital, to take care of the injured,” said SK Panda, a spokesman for the regional authorities. He added that 75 ambulances and “numerous buses” were sent to the scene to transport both injured passengers and survivors. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his part said he was “distressed”.
Fatal accidents
“My thoughts are with the bereaved families. May the injured recover quickly,” Narendra Modi tweeted, adding that he had spoken with Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw to “update the situation”. Ashwini Vaishnaw announced that he would go to the scene of the accident urgently, and that the army had been mobilized to help. “We will requisition all the arms necessary for the rescue operations,” he said on Twitter.
India has experienced several other rail disasters in the past, but safety on the rails has improved significantly in recent years thanks to massive new investments and technological upgrades. The deadliest railway accident in this country is that of June 6, 1981 when, in the state of Bihar (east), seven wagons of a train which was crossing a bridge, fell into a river, the Bagmati, making between 800 and 1,000 dead.
Another particularly deadly recent accident: on November 20, 2016, the Patna-Indore express train, on board which were 2,000 people, derailed early in the morning in a rural area of the state of Uttar Pradesh (north), at a time when most of its passengers were asleep. The disaster left 146 dead and around 180 injured. Since the turn of the century, 13 rail accidents, including at least three caused by terrorist attacks, have each claimed more than 50 lives.