Crash heartache of bride ...
TRAIN HORROR: EIGHT OF ONE FAMILY AMONG THE 18 PEOPLE KILLED IN TAIWAN
President on hand to console survivors after train derailed, leaving 187 hurt.
Tung Xiao-ling, 43, sobbed as she told how she had lost eight of 17 family members, aged nine to 67, in a horror train crash in Taiwan as they returned from celebrating her sister’s wedding.
“No one can accept that one day you are a bride and the next day you are mourning family members” said Tung, who was not on board the train. “I hope they find out what happened as soon as possible.”
Taiwan President Tsai Ingwen offered words of consolation yesterday as she met relatives of 18 people killed and 187 injured when the train derailed in the island’s northeast – its worst rail disaster in more than three decades.
Officials said four carriages overturned on Sunday after all eight cars of a train carrying 366 passengers left the tracks on a bend near a railway station in Yilan county, about 40km from Taipei, the island’s capital.
Tsai joined Buddhist monks in prayer before an altar adorned with flowers next to a hospital, while nearby, relatives and friends of the victims wept as they sifted through battered suitcases recovered from the train wreck.
“We are really sorry ... you have to stay strong,” Tsai told Chen Yuchan, 41, whose only daughter, a seventh grader, was killed.
“We will do everything we can,” she told another person, who was sobbing bitterly during her visit to the hospital.
Health authorities appealed for blood donations to help treat the many injured people, who included one foreigner, an American. Six of the dead were under 18, officials said.
The disaster was Taiwan’s deadliest rail accident since a 1981 collision that killed 30 people, the official Central News Agency said.
The head of the state railway administration, Lu Jie-shen, had offered to resign but the transport minister did not accept the offer, the news agency reported.
China’s policy-making Taiwan affairs office expressed “deep condolences” to the families of victims.
Train services resumed early yesterday, after all the derailed carriages had been moved to one side of the tracks.
Many of the casualties happened in a carriage at the front of the train, said one official, adding that the driver, surnamed You, has been moved out of intensive care. “We will ask him what happened after he stabilises,” said Liu Can-huang, head of the car maintenance unit of the railways.
The train recorder, which tracks speed, had been sent to prosecutors to be examined.
The fastest of Taiwan’s trains, the Puyuma Express began operating in 2013.
“This is something that is not supposed to happen when taking a train,” said Chen Tai-liang, whose niece, a seventh grader, was killed. “Why did it happen?” – Reuters