Throughout the night, the inhabitants of Balasore were kept awake by the uninterrupted comings and goings of at least 120 ambulances carrying the wounded to the three closest hospitals. The Indian city in the eastern state of Odisha is the closest to where the train crash which involved three trains. At least 288 people died, more than 900 wounded, but the data are still absolutely provisional and the chief secretary of the state (the highest local civil authority) Pradeep Jena has warned that the budget is destined to rise further.
According to the first reconstructions of the accident, the Coromandel Express, which was traveling from Kolkata, in West Bengal, to Chennai, in Tamil Nadu, at a speed of about 130 kilometers per hour collided yesterday around 19 local time with a train merci stopped, causing it to derail. The carriages of the freight train then collided with two carriages of the Howrah Superfast Express train, which was traveling in the opposite direction. Rajesh Kumar, deputy commercial director of South Eastern Railway, said the Coromandel Express had changed tracks, thus causing the accident, to rreasons that are being investigated in these hours by the responsible authorities.
About 2,000 rescuers are on site and in the hospitals, small and poorly equipped, it’s chaos: local media report that doctors and nurses are working tirelessly in the absolute chaos to deal with the more than 900 injured in the disaster, many of whom are in critical condition. On the site of the disaster the men of the Civil Protection and other agencies are engaged in a race against time to extract people still alive from the carriages of the three trains: according to those responsible for the rescue, many wagons are still overturned and tangled on the tracks. The corpses are transferred to a school in the city of Balasore; the district administration reports that it has started work to transform a shed in the industrial area into a morgue, a necessary step to allow relatives to identify the bodies.
Responding to the calls spread through the media and on the web, hundreds of people spent the night in line to donate blood in mobile units set up in front of hospitals. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Railways has announced a contribution of one million rupees (about 11,000 euros) for the families of the victims and 200,000 rupees (about 2,200 euros) for the most seriously injured. Indian premier Narendra Modi will travel to the site of the disaster, in Balasore, and then to the Cuttack hospital, where most of the injured have been hospitalized.