ASIA India train crash toll continues to rise
Sniffer dogs search for signs of life in wreck
PUKHRYAN: The death toll from India’s worst train accident in years rose to 145 yesterday, as rescuers used cranes to lift the twisted metal wreckage to check for more bodies underneath.
The passenger train was about midway through a 27-hour journey between the cities of Indore and Patna when it slid off the tracks at 3.10am on Sunday. The impact was so strong that one of the coaches landed atop another, crushing the one below. Passengers were jolted awake and said they heard the crash as they were flung from their beds.
“There was a loud sound like an earthquake. I fell from my berth and a lot of luggage fell over me,” Ramchandra Tewari, who suffered a head injury, said from his hospital bed in the industrial city of Kanpur. “I thought I was dead, and then I passed out.”
Rescue workers, soldiers and members of India’s disaster management force worked through the night to pull out people trapped amid the twisted metal and overturned coaches near Pukhrayan, a village outside Kanpur about 400km southeast of New Delhi.
Emergency workers with sniffer dogs moved from carriage to carriage looking for signs of life as cranes and heavy machinery began moving sections of the wreckage.
By yesterday morning, t hey had searched the last of the 14 wrecked cars, but had yet to lift the coach from the tracks to see if more bodies had been trapped beneath.
“The search operation at the site is almost over. I’m saying ‘almost’, because they are trying to lift the coach with the help of cranes, and check if there are any bodies,” Indian Railways spokesman Anil Saxena said. “We can be sure only after the coach is lifted up and removed from the track.”
The accident killed at least 145, of which 116 had been identified, according to Dr Aneeta Singh, the chief medical officer of Kanpur Dehat district where Pukhrayan village is located.
Roughly 226 people were hurt, including 76 with serious injuries, according to local police Insp Gen Zaki Ahmad. Medical teams provided first aid near the site, while those in more serious condition were moved to hospitals in Kanpur.
More than 2,000 people are believed to have been on the train, though many were travelling without reserved seats or without tickets at all.
Fighting back tears, the 26-year-old business student Uttam Kumar recalled how he waited over three hours to be cut out of a mangled train carriage, which was crushed under another.
“It was like being in a nightmare. It was happening, but I couldn’t believe it was happening,” he said from his hospital bed in Kanpur.
“They cut the part of the carriage where I was stuck and pulled me out. Then I remember being moved to the ambulance, which was parked next to the site. I was the only one alive among all the dead bodies.”
Anxious relatives searched for their family members among the injured and the dead at hospitals in Kanpur.
Rail authorities ordered an investigation into what caused the derailment. Some told local media they suspected faulty tracks.
“We haven’t seen an incident like this in Indian Railways for a long time,” said the state’s railways minister, Rajen Gohain,
according to the Indian Express newspaper.
“There must be a fault in the track as 14 bogeys have derailed, and this happened despite regular checking of the tracks.”
The Patna-Indore Express Train derailing was one of India’s deadliest train accidents in at least five years. Accidents are relatively common on India’s sprawling rail network, which is the world’s third largest but lacks modern signalling and communication systems. Most accidents are blamed on poor maintenance, outdated equipment and human error.