“It’s like taking my son out of a bombing raid. They are all very young boys. A tangle of bodies, of iron, of plastic, of luggage» (Yiannis Xanthopoulos, rescuer). “I’m looking for news of my sister-in-law. She was in the first two carriages. She disappeared into thin air. I don’t have the DNA test left. AND we’ll be lucky if they give us a body to bury» (Nikos Makris, familiar). “Three friends of mine were on it. Car 5. I heard them last night when they left. Now I wait. I’m not among the wounded, I’m not among the dead. And you don’t know what the worst they can tell you is» (Kostantinos, 24 years old, student).
The last intercity of the evening was that of the students: it was cheaper. Who had gone to carnival in Athens, who returned to Thessaloniki for the Orthodox Lent, who had said goodbye to family and friends before throwing themselves back on the exams of the March session. Niko, a 23-year-old medical student, was on the phone with his mother when he only had time to swear, “What the…”, and the line went dead. “Some bodies are completely unrecognizable,” warns a doctor at the Larissa hospital: incinerated on the first two carriages at 1,300 degrees of temperature, canceled in the mists of time. “All I remember is a very strong nailing – a survivor tells Greek TV -. There were flames in the windows. The panic. I threw myself out, I was just thinking about escaping». Another boy, Lazos, is interviewed as he walks covered in blood, «but I’m not wounded, it’s the blood of those who died near me». “Ten nightmare seconds – says Stergios Minenis, 28 years old -. We fell on our side. An absurd mess.’ “I went out breaking the windows with the suitcase and with my back – Angelos Tsiamuras has a faint voice -, at first I thought it was an earthquake”.
The massacre of twenty-year-olds is in the air that still smells of burnt, twenty hours later. Two red cranes move the sheet metal sepulcher, the rosary of about forty ambulances waiting for flashing lights. National mourning, the resignation of the Minister of Transport, Prime Minister Mitsotakis arriving in Thessaly to promise clarity, President Sakellaropoulos canceling a visit to Moldova and saying “unimaginable tragedy” are not enough. It was imaginable, indeed. “Bastards!” they shout in front of Larissa’s resuscitation. Why train disasters like this, they are remembered only in Spain (2013) and in Germany (1998), such scenes only in India or in the Urals. And everyone now thinks that there are responsibilities, serious responsibilities: not just the “human error” of a station master under arrest, who would have pressed the track change button and warned his colleagues on the phone, but would not have noticed that the electronic system was not working. The dynamic is similar to the Andria disaster in Puglia in 2016.
“Four months ago we denounced the risks,” says the Greek union of railway workers: «The shifts are exhausting, 28 days a month and a lot of overtime, we have 750 employees when 2,100 would be needed. Today it is no longer possible for station masters to talk to each other on their cell phones. It has to be all automated.” Greece has always focused on air and road transport and it is the country with the most dangerous railways in Europe: in the last decade, 137 dead and 97 seriously injured due to derailments, pedestrians run over, inadequate signage. There are 1,263 level crossings, almost double that in the rest of the EU, and half of them are unattended.
Dal 2017, the operator TrainOse (today Helleni train) is 100% controlled by Trenitalia and the system is slowly being modernized. But corruption and scandals have characterized Greek railway history in recent years. And 80 percent of the network, until a few years ago, had no working traffic lights and operated only with the so-called telephone block: “We work without electronic systems – denounced some time ago a train driver, Kostas Genidounias -. You are on the train and you have to ask the stop attendant: hey, Kostas, did you turn the key? He answers yes. But you can’t verify if he really did it. You just have to trust.” The guys from the Athens-Thessaloniki intercity also trusted them. Yesterday morning in the fields, cell phone in hand, Niko’s mother wandered around looking for her son.