The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Rescue, recovery efforts continue at site of train wreck
Emergency crews cut through the mangled remains of a passenger train on Thursday, progressing “centimeter by centimeter” in their search for the dead from a head-on collision in northern Greece that killed at least 46 people. Rail workers went on strike to protest years of underfunding that they say has left the country’s train system in a dangerous state.
The passenger train and a freight train slammed into each other late Tuesday, crumpling carriages into twisted steel knots and forcing people to smash windows to escape. It was the country’s deadliest crash ever, and more than 50 people remained hospitalized, most in the central Greek city of Larissa. Six were in intensive care.
Fire Service spokesman Yiannis Artopios said the grim recovery effort was proceeding “centimeter by centimeter.”
“We can see that there are more (bodies) people there. Unfortunately they are in a very bad condition because of the collision,” Artopios told state television.
The cause of the crash is still not clear. The Larissa station manager arrested after the collision was charged Wednesday with multiple
counts of manslaughter and causing serious physical harm, as an inquiry tries to establish why the trains were traveling in opposite directions on the same track.
Railway workers’ associations, meanwhile, called strikes, halting national rail services and the subway in Athens. They are protesting working conditions and what they described as a dangerous failure to modernize the Greek rail system.
More than 300 people were on board the passenger train, many of them students returning from a holiday weekend and annual Carnival celebrations around Greece.
Andreas Alikaniotis, a 20-yearold survivor of the crash, described how he and fellow students escaped from a jackknifed train car as fire approached, smashing windows and throwing luggage onto the ground outside to use as a makeshift landing pad.
“It was a steep drop, into a ditch,” Alikaniotis, who suffered a knee injury, told reporters from his hospital bed in Larissa.
“The lights went out . ... The smoke was suffocating inside the rail car but also outside,” Alikaniotis said.
He said he was “one of the few around who had not been seriously injured.”
“Me and my friends helped people get out.”