A grim scene was playing out at a small school a few hundred yards away on Saturday as giant excavators tried to free the crushed trains at the scene of India’s worst train disaster in decades.
In humid air filled with the smell of human flesh, relatives went through the grueling exercise of identifying their loved ones from the nearly 120 dead bodies lined up on the ground after the crash on Friday night.
Among the searchers was Mia John Mulla, who had come from neighboring West Bengal to look for her son Musavir, who was on his way to a tailoring job in Chennai. Mr. When Mulla finally found Musawir’s body, most of it was charred, but his face was mostly intact.
“When I saw my son’s face, I thought he had gone to sleep,” Mr Mulla said. “But when I saw his body, I raised my hands to God and asked what I did that my flower became charcoal?”
At least 288 people were killed and more than 700 injured in what officials described in a preliminary government report as a “three-way accident” involving two passenger trains and a defunct freight train in the eastern state of Odisha. Officials said that an investigation is underway to determine whether signal failure was the cause of the accident.
The unusually large toll, even in a nation with a long history of fatal accidents, renewed long-standing questions about safety issues in the transportation system. More than eight billion passengers per year.
It’s emerging as one of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s signature appeals as he gears up for a third term in office next year, albeit temporarily — his massive push to modernize India’s long-deteriorating infrastructure.
Mr. Modi was scheduled to inaugurate the latest in a series of new high-speed trains on Saturday, the rollout of each timed to build momentum for his campaign. Instead, they arrived at the wreckage site in Odisha to assess the damage.
“We will not be able to bring back the people we have lost. But the government is with their families in their grief,” Modi said after visiting the site. “This is a very serious incident for the government. We have given directions for all kinds of inquiries and whoever is found responsible will be given severe punishment. Can’t let go.”
As Mr. Modi left the site after inspecting the remains, a large contingent of police had to scramble to hold back thousands of people who had gathered nearby. Excavators removed what was left of the collided trains and railway workers tried to clear the tracks to resume train service.
The survivors of the accident were carrying hundreds of migrant workers, students and daily wage workers packed shoulder-to-shoulder in at least three general sections – most of them standing – when the trains collided.
“It was full of people,” said Sayel Ali, who was admitted to a hospital near the crash site. “You can only see heads. When the accident happened, I couldn’t see anything. I don’t know how I got to the hospital.”
Some initial details about the cause of the disaster have begun to emerge, though not much is clear.
According to an initial government report seen by The New York Times, the Coromandel Express, a high-speed passenger train traveling from Kolkata, collided with a locally idling freight train at the small-town station of Bahanaga Bazar around 7 p.m. time The report said that the passenger train was going full speed across the station as it was not supposed to stop.
A passenger train carrying 1,257 passengers derailed after colliding with a freight train. Twenty-one of its coaches bounced off the track, three of which spilled onto another track.
“Simultaneously,” according to the report, a Bengaluru-to-Kolkata passenger train, carrying 1,039 passengers, was heading in the opposite direction to the Yeswantpur-Howrah Express – on a track where three coaches were displaced. This second collision caused the last two coaches of the third train to roll off its tracks.
Officials still have no explanation as to why the freight train was stopped, or why Coromandel Express was not alerted to its presence on the tracks, leading to the utter disaster.
South Eastern Railway Chief Public Relations Officer Aditya Kumar Choudhary confirmed the reports saying that “preliminary enquiry” indicated that it could be due to signal failure. But Mr Chaudhary said those initial suggestions would need to be examined in a full investigation.
“The train was supposed to go on the main line, but the signal pointer was given for the loop line. Mr. Chaudhary said that the supervisor has indicated that. “There are a lot of ifs and buts. It should be checked and cross checked. “
“It was a devastating scene because the train was at high speed, full speed,” Odisha fire service chief Sudhanshu Sarangi said after arriving at the accident site. “The goods train was stopped; Two other trains were running.”
Information technology worker Shasvat Gupta, 25, who boarded a train in Kolkata with his sister and her children to visit his parents in Cuttack, Odisha, said their coach flipped to a 90-degree angle. ” after a sudden jerk.
“I was able to locate the emergency window, and we managed to get out of the train,” he said. “Among other coaches, I would hear shouting and crying. There was a lot of blood. “
The government declared a day of mourning in Odisha, home to about 45 million people. Dozens of trains have been cancelled. Teams from the Indian Army, Air Force and National Disaster Management Force were mobilized to assist. and people near the crash site Dressed up to donate blood.
Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnav told reporters on Saturday that an investigation has been ordered to find out the cause of the accident.
“Our immediate focus is on rescue and relief,” he said from the scene of the disaster. “We will know more after the trial.”
Friday’s tragedy was the deadliest since a 1995 accident in which two trains collided 125 miles from Delhi, killing more than 350 people.
India’s railway system, one of the largest in the world, was first developed by the British colonial authorities in the 19th century. Today, more than 40,000 miles of track — about one and a half times the length of the Earth’s orbit — spread like capillaries over a nation twice the size of Alaska, stretching from the Himalayas to tropical rainforests.
Passenger safety in India has come under scrutiny in recent years.
In 2012, a committee appointed to review the safety of the rail network cited a “grim picture of inadequate performance due to poor infrastructure and resources”. It recommended several urgent measures, including renovating tracks, repairing bridges, removing road-level crossings and replacing old train cars that would better protect passengers in the event of an accident.
In 2016, over 140 sleeping passengers were killed and 200 injured when 14 coaches of a train derailed in northeast India in the middle of the night. Officials at the time said a “fracture” in the rails may have been the cause. In 2017, at least 36 passengers were killed and 40 injured in a late-night derailment in southern India.
The Modi administration has spent tens of billions of dollars to refurbish and modernize aging trains and tracks, accelerating work to improve rail safety. As of 2020, for two consecutive years, India has recorded no passenger deaths in serious train accidents. It was a first, and Mr. Modi’s government hailed it as an achievement. Until 2017, more than 100 passengers were killed every year.
Partha Mukhopadhyay, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research, who previously served on the Indian government’s Railway Restructuring Committee, said “judicious capital investment” has reduced the frequency of accidents in recent years.
“Twenty or 30 years ago, India built many things but didn’t have the resources to keep up with them all,” he said. “But now, even though the economy isn’t growing terribly, this kind of spending isn’t going down.”
Sameer Yasir Balasore, India Report, and Mujeeb Mashal And Kumar Day From New Delhi. The report was contributed Alex Travelli, Karan Deep Singh And Suhasini Raj In New Delhi, Mike Ives in Seoul and and Bilefsky in Toronto.
