Faced with growing outrage over the causes of the head-on collision between two trains on Tuesday night, the Greek government has said that the country’s rail projects have been plagued by “chronic ills in the public sector.” In what represents the first official acknowledgment of the difficulties facing the rail network, the authorities have also admitted that the current centre-right government has failed in its attempts to improve the system.
“We are all devastated by this tragic incident,” said a government spokesman, Giannis Oikonomou, during a press conference as the death toll rose to 57. “The loss and trauma that this has caused, the physical and psychological trauma of the survivors, and the anguish in this country is enormous, and difficult to manage, especially at this time.”
While the rescue teams resumed the arduous tasks of searching for the dead in the most damaged wagons, Oikonomou said that the authorities would investigate the causes of the accident and the delays in the execution of railway projects that “have their origin in chronic ills of the [sector] Greek public that the government has not been able to eradicate”.
Privatized during the crisis
Outrage over the accident, which occurred just outside Tempe in central Greece, is mounting. On Wednesday night, groups of protesters hurled stones at the offices of the railway company in Athens, before riot police dispersed them with tear gas. Protests also broke out in Thessaloniki.
Railroad and subway workers went on strike on Thursday. In a statement, the rail transport company Hellenic Train explains that the 24-hour strike has been called in protest against the “lack of respect that [los sucesivos] governments have shown towards the Greek railways, which led to the tragic outcome of Tempe”.
Hellenic Train is one of many public services in Greece that were privatized during the country’s debt crisis.
A Greek magistrate has called for an urgent investigation into allegations of inadequate signage on a long stretch of road leading to Athens’ international airport, used each year by millions of tourists from other countries. The Federation of Railway Employees has made the accusations and they have gone all the way to television to demand that action be taken.
The salvage operation is proving particularly complicated by the need to use special cutting machines to unravel the mangled remains.
full of students
Several students are believed to have been gathered in the dining car, the second car, which took the full impact of the head-on collision when the two formations collided at 11:20 p.m. on Tuesday. They had boarded the night train for Thessaloniki in Athens after a three-day holiday weekend.
“It was a student train, full of kids in their 20s,” Costas Bargiotas, the hospital’s chief orthopedic doctor, told Skai TV. “It has been something truly shocking, the wagons crumpled as if they were made of paper.”
The search will continue in the coming days, but there is not much hope of finding survivors, according to emergency workers, who say temperatures in the two front carriages exceeded 1,300 degrees Celsius when they burst into flames.
Witnesses rushing to the crash site, 378 kilometers north of Athens, witnessed a scene of devastation. Passengers who had managed to flee the train, or had been thrown out of windows, spoke of chaos and panic. One survivor described the terror of having to decide in a split second between “burning myself alive or jumping up and breaking every bone”. She is one of 66 injured people who were taken to a hospital. At least six of the injured are on assisted breathing.
National duel
According to the media, the grim victim identification process is becoming more complicated because forensics have largely only been able to work with cremated body parts. Family members desperately searching for their loved ones have been forced to provide DNA samples that are compared with that of the corpses so that they can be released to their loved ones.
Greece is in the midst of national mourning and Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has ordered flags to be flown at half mast during the three days of official mourning. “We are living in especially dark days for our country,” Giorgos Gerapetritis, the new Minister of Transport, told journalists after the resignation on Wednesday of Kostas Karamanlis, who resigned “in memory of the victims.” “After this tragic accident, the country is going through extremely difficult times,” Gerapetritis said.
Prime Minister Mitsotakis has promised an independent inquiry with a cross-party committee of experts.
The stationmaster of Larissa, the nearest town to the crash site, has accepted part of the responsibility for the tragedy, but other factors were also at play, according to his lawyer. Stefanos Pantzartzidis has declared to the press that his client, arrested in the hours after the accident, has been accused of disrupting transport and endangering lives. “He is literally broken,” Pantzartzidis has said. “From the first moment, he has assumed a responsibility proportional to him… [pero] there has been a convergent neglect of many other factors.”
Mitsotakis and other members of his government have been quick to speak of “human error” but there is a growing belief that the tragedy could have been prevented. “This is not a mistake, but a crime,” says the opposition newspaper on its front page Syntaktwnwhere it is explained that the railway unions have been warning of the dangers inherent in the system for some time.
Translation by Francisco de Zárate.