The death toll from India’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades climbed to at least 288 people with 900 more injured Saturday, as officials eventually called off efforts to find more survivors.
Rescuers desperately combed through the mangled wreckage and climbed atop trains to burn open doors and windows using cutting torches, searching for any signs of life following Friday’s “three-way accident” involving two passenger trains and an idled freight train in the eastern state of Odisha.
The accident was possibly caused by a signal error, according to a preliminary government report.
Scores of bodies, covered by white sheets, lay on the ground near the tracks while locals and rescuers raced to free hundreds trapped inside the rail cars under the metal remains and shattered glass.
One man told the BBC he only learned his mom died in the crash after forwarding her photo to friends and acquaintances and describing the dress she wore when he last saw her.
“They sent me a picture of a body – it was my mother,” said the man, who added his name is Suryaveer.
“She was wearing the same dress.”
“All I want now is to be able to take her body back home safely, so that we can put her to rest. But there is so much chaos here. There are no trains and the roads are all jammed.”
Suryaveer said his mother and grandmother were on the train and heading to buy medicine. He said he found his grandmother alive a few hours after the crash.
Army soldiers and air force helicopters joined the effort.
But after an extensive search-and-rescue — which included hundreds of fire department personnel, police officers, and National Disaster Response Force teams as well as sniffer dogs — authorities ended the rescue operation.
“Families crushed away, limbless bodies and a bloodbath on the tracks,” said surviving passenger Anubha Das.
Workers also started clearing debris to restore rail traffic.
“This is very, very tragic. I have never seen anything like this in my career,” said Sudhanshu Sarangi, director of Odisha state’s fire and emergency department.
The high-speed passenger train traveling from Kolkata, the Coromandel Express, slammed into a freight train that had been idling at a small-town station, Bahanaga Bazar, around 7 p.m. local time Friday. The passenger train was “going at full speed across the station as it was not supposed to stop” there, the report said, according to The New York Times.
After hitting the freight train, the passenger train, which was carrying 1,257 passengers, derailed. Twenty-one of its coaches bounced off the track, with three more cars landing onto another track.
“Simultaneously” the Yesvantpur-Howrah Express, a passenger train with 1,039 aboard heading in the opposite direction from Bengaluru to Kolkata, was on the track that the three dislocated coaches lay. This second collision knocked the two coaches of the third train off its tracks.
Officials could not immediately say why the freight train was stopped, nor why the Coromandel Express was not alerted to its presence on the tracks.
“By 10 p.m. [on Friday] we were able to rescue the survivors. After that it was about picking up dead bodies,” said Sudhanshu Sarangi, director of Odisha state’s fire and emergency department. “This is very, very tragic. I have never seen anything like this in my career.”
Families of the dead will receive 1 million rupees ($12,000), and the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, according to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
The accident occurred at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi is focusing on modernizing the British colonial-era railroad network in India, which has become the world’s most populous country with 1.42 billion.
Despite government efforts to improve rail safety, several hundred accidents occur every year on India’s railways, the largest train network under one management in the world.
Modi flew to the crash site and spent half an hour examining relief efforts while talking to rescue leaders.
He was also seen giving instructions on the phone to officials in New Delhi.
Modi on Saturday was supposed to inaugurate a high-speed train connecting Goa and Mumbai that is equipped with a collision avoidance system.
The festivities were canceled after Friday’s tragedy, and the derailed trains did not have that system.
Amitabh Sharma, a Railroad Ministry spokesperson, said the rescue work was near completion.
Rail authorities will start removing the wreckage to repair the track and resume train operations, he said.
Indian Railways transports more than 13 million people every day, but the state-run agency has had a shady safety record because of decaying infrastructure.
Modi’s administration has launched high-speed trains as part of plans to modernize the network, but critics say it has not focused enough on safety and upgrading its aging 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.
With Post wires
