They survived Taiwan’s train crash. Their loved ones did not.
HUALIEN, Taiwan — Crawling through the smoky wreckage, she first found her husband and son pinned under luggage lockers and mangled steel, but they weren’t breathing. Then she called her daughter’s name. A faint voice responded: “I’m over here.”
Following the voice, Hana Kacaw found her daughter underneath a mass of metal train parts. She tried pulling pieces of the wreckage off, but it was no use.
“Please hold on,” she urged. “Someone is coming to rescue us.”
“I can’t hang on any longer,” her daughter responded, according to Kacaw. Those were her last words. Just like that, Kacaw had lost her husband of more than 20 years and their 21-year-old son and 20-year-old daughter, both promising athletes in college. They were among the 51 people who were killed Friday when a train derailed along Taiwan’s east coast in the island’s worst such disaster in four decades. Others who died included the train’s two drivers, at least two young children, as well as a French national and an American.
The eight-car Taroko Express train had been nearly full, with about 490 passengers — including 120 or so who held standing-room-only tickets — on the first day of a long holiday weekend in Taiwan. Authorities say the train, which was bound for the eastern city of Taitung, probably collided with a construction vehicle that had rolled down a slope onto the track, then slammed into a tunnel.
Authorities, who have pledged a thorough investigation, said Saturday that a suspect had been questioned and then released on bail. The government also said that it might compensate families about $190,000 for each deceased person, although it would finalize the amount later.
By Saturday, rescuers had saved all those they presumed had survived and were using excavators to try to pull out the train cars. The casualties were the greatest in several train cars — numbered 5 to 8 — that were stuck deep inside the tunnel. Kacaw, who had been in car 8, at the front of the train, had eventually found her way out of the tunnel on her own.
After spending a sleepless night in a hotel, she joined dozens of other grieving relatives Saturday in the grim, painful task of identifying remains and saying their goodbyes.
They gathered at a temporary support center that had been set up under tents outside a funeral home in Hualien, a city south of the crash site. They took turns entering a morgue where bodies were being kept, and many emerged shaken and distraught. Some discussed funeral arrangements and reviewed autopsy reports, while volunteers, Christian pastors and Buddhist monks — and even President Tsai Ing-wen, briefly — offered comfort.
For some families, grief has been complicated by uncertainty. Some relatives were frustrated that they had been unable to identify their loved ones, but officials said they were hoping that DNA samples would help. The impact of the crash was so great and the destruction so severe, the officials explained, that in several train cars, rescuers could only extricate human remains in parts.
Inside these train cars, the acrid smell of blood hung in the air, Zeng Wen-Long, a volunteer Red Cross rescue worker, said in an interview. It was there, also in car 8, that Zeng’s team found 5-year-old Yang Chi-chen, who had been traveling with her older sister and father, wedged under a chair.
More than an hour passed before the team had reached her Friday, and she was already very weak. Zeng said he had carried her to her father, Max Yang, who was leaning against the tunnel and had called out to the rescuers, asking to hold the motionless child.
Yang, 42, said he had tried calling to her to wake her up. Several times, he said, her eyes would flutter open before closing again.
“I’m sorry,” Yang told her. By the time they got to a hospital, Yang said, Chi-chen had died. She was one of the youngest victims. Her 9-yearold sister remains in intensive care.