The death toll from the train accident that took place yesterday at the Bahanaga station is still being updatedin Balasore district in India. The confirmed dead, the director general of the Odisha state fire brigade Sudhanshu Sarangi told AFP, they are 288. Sarangi also confirmed the fact that others hundreds of people were injured in the clash.
There are at least two thousand rescuers from the Civil Protection and other agencies engaged in a fight against time to extract people still alive from the carriages of the three trains that collided around 7pm. According to the rescue managers, many carriages are still overturned and tangled on the tracks after the collision involving two passenger trains and a freight train following the derailment of one of the two passenger trains. 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.
According to an initial reconstruction, a dozen carriages of the Shalimar-Chennai Coromandel Express derailed near Baleswar ending up on the opposite track. “A train from Yeswanthpur to Howrah crashed into those carriages causing the derailment of its 3-4 carriages,” said Railways spokesman Amitabh Sharma. A second passenger train would also be involved in the disaster, but the dynamics of the events are not yet clear. “We are not yet able to establish what happened, several teams are on site and everyone is engaged in rescue operations,” said a police official. At present, 75 ambulances have been dispatched to the site of the tragedy to help transport the injured to medical facilities in the region.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said he was “saddened by the train crash”. “At this time of grief, my thoughts are with the grieving families. May the injured recover soon. I spoke to Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw and took stock of the situation,” he tweeted. Rescue operations are underway at the scene and “all possible assistance” is being provided to those affected, he added.
“Our top priority now is to rescue the passengers and provide medical care to the injured,” Orissa State Secretary General Pradeep Jena explained while Railways Minister Vaishnaw said “rescue teams have been mobilized from Bhubaneswar, Kolkata , the national emergency response unit and also the air force. There will be all the necessary personnel for the rescue operations,” he tweeted. Indian Railways transport tens of millions of people every day and until a few years ago accidents were more frequent as the infrastructures remained essentially those built in the British colonial era. However, the safety of the railways – thanks to massive new investments and upgrading of technology – has improved significantly in recent years. The latest major disaster dates back to November 2016 when 147 people died in a train derailment in the state of Uttar Pradesh.
“Terrible news from India – wrote the president of the European Commission on Twitter, Ursula von der Leyen -. I express my deepest condolences to the families of the victims of the Orissa train crash and wish a speedy recovery to the injured. The people of India are in our thoughts at this time of grief. Europe mourns with you”.
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