‘Bloodbath’ crash worst in decades
At least 288 people have died in India’s worst rail crash in more than two decades, officials said yesterday, after a passenger train went off the tracks and hit another one in an accident a preliminary report blamed on signal failure.
One train in Saturday’s accident also hit a freight train parked nearby in the district of Balasore in Odisha state in the east of the country, leaving a tangled mess of smashed rail cars and injuring 803.
The death toll has reached 288, South Eastern Railway’s public relations officer K. S. Anand said.
Dead bodies were still trapped in the mangled coaches and the rescue operation was continuing, a Reuters witness said yesterday, while the death toll was expected to rise.
A preliminary report indicated that the accident was the result of signal failure, Anand said.
‘‘The Coromandel Express was supposed to travel on the main line, but a signal was given for the loop line instead, and the train rammed into a goods train already parked over there. Its coaches then fell on to the tracks on either side, also derailing the Howrah Superfast Express,’’ he said.
Surviving passenger Anubha Das said he would never forget the scene, describing it as a ‘‘bloodbath on the tracks’’.
Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks, with rescue teams searching the mangled carriages to pull the survivors out and rush them to hospital.
Dead bodies were lying on the bloodstained floor of a school used as a makeshift morgue, and police helped relatives identify the bodies, covered with white cloths and placed inside bags.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived at the scene, talked to rescue workers and inspected the wreckage. He also met the survivors at hospitals.
A witness involved in rescue operations said the screams and cries of the injured and the relatives of those killed were ‘‘horrific and heartwrenching’’.
Families of the dead will receive 1 million rupees ($NZ20,000), while the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Some state governments have also announced compensation.
The collision occurred at around 7pm on Friday local time (Saturday 1.30am NZST). Indian Railways, the staterun monopoly has had a patchy safety record because of ageing infrastructure.
India’s deadliest railway accident was in 1981 when a train plunged off a bridge into a river in Bihar state, killing an estimated 800 people.