The investigation into a fatal train crash focuses on a signal failure, with rescue efforts ending

Originally Posted: Jun 04 23 03:21 ET

Updated: Jun 04, 23 at 11:06 a.m. ET

BALASORE, India (CNN) – Authorities investigating one of the deadliest train accidents in Indian history are looking into whether a signal failure led to the disaster, as rescue workers ended their search for survivors and overturned train cars were evacuated from the tracks on Sunday.

Less than 48 hours after the devastating crash in the eastern state of Odisha, which left at least 275 dead and more than 1,000 injured, officials scrambled to restart rail services, as dozens of workers toil in 118-degree Fahrenheit temperatures to bring tracks back online. . With the railways still closed, family members of the deceased passengers have had to find their way by other means to call their loved ones.

At the wreck site, among agricultural fields, the belongings of several people who were on board the passenger trains when they were hit by a freight train were still strewn on the ground. Bags, suitcases, shoes and personal items were lined up on the tracks. Broken rail cars were rolling into a ditch, some lying on their side.

Deepak Behera, 37, was playing soccer in the nearby town of Balasore on Friday evening when the accident occurred. He heard a deafening noise. “For a moment we thought it was an earthquake,” he said.

Lake and other locals rushed to the crash site to find hundreds of passengers crammed into the overturned carriages in complete darkness, desperate to find a way out. They used flashlights on their mobile phones and started searching for survivors.

We found a lot of screaming and crying. “The carriages turned so badly and were smashed that no one was able to get out,” Behaira said, adding that he had pulled 28 people alive from the carriages, as well as countless dead.

Many bodies were still unidentified on Sunday. In a sign of the chaos at the site, the death toll was lowered from at least 288 after officials said some bodies at the site were counted twice.

One of the survivors of the disaster, Anshuman Purohit, described a horrifying scene – train cars piled two or three stories high on top of each other, passengers crushed by debris, blood everywhere.

Porohi, who was in first class and was sitting near the end of the train, said, “When we opened the door, I actually heard the wailing of humanity, screaming in pain and screaming for water and screaming for help.” .

“There were so many corpses with unimaginable injuries. I saw a head without a corpse, I saw smashed skulls, I saw corpses completely smashed with the metal of the train… It was terrifying.”

Anger over the fatal accident is building across India, now the world’s most populous country, and renewing calls for authorities to address safety issues in a railway system that carries more than 13 million passengers each day. While the government recently poured millions into modernizing the system, years of neglect have left the tracks untapped.

India’s Railways Minister, Ashwini Vaishnau, said on Sunday that the accident occurred “due to a change in electronic interlocking” and that the investigation would show “who was responsible for this error”.

“The cause has been determined and those responsible have been identified,” he told the Indian news agency ANI, refusing to give more details until the government’s report.

According to senior officials of the railways, the Coromandel Express, a high-speed train which was traveling from Kolkata to Chennai, diverted to a loop line and collided with a heavy goods train which was malfunctioning at Bahanaga Bazar railway station. Its carriages derailed into the opposite lane, colliding with an oncoming high-speed train, the Howrah Express, which was traveling from Bangalore.

Jaya Varma Sinha, an official of the Indian Ministry of Railways, said on Sunday that the high speed of the collision of the Coromandel Express with the freight train, which was carrying iron ore, had contributed to the high number of casualties and injuries.

“The impact was high as the train was moving at top speed, 128 km per hour [79.5mph]”The other issue here is that it is a goods train carrying iron ore, and it is a heavy train so I felt the full impact of the collision on the moving train,” Sinha said.

She added that the other passenger train was also moving at a very high speed, 126 km/h [78.2mph]and that in the last split second he came into the path of the other derailed coaches.

Hopes of finding more survivors faded as authorities on Sunday shifted their focus from searching for people trapped under the overturned wagons to clearing the wreckage. All 21 derailed buses have been moved and the rest of the site is being repaired so services can start again.

Hundreds of workers, many of them working by hand with picks and shovels, were toiling in the heat and humidity of Sunday repairing the rails. The Indian Ministry of Railways said that seven drilling rigs, two accident relief trains and four railway and road cranes have been deployed at the site.

Vaishinau, the railways minister, who is facing calls from opposition politicians to resign, said the aim was to have “a complete, almost normal situation by Wednesday morning,” adding, “We have mobilized a lot of resources.”

More than 1,000 people are still injured, and more than 100 patients are in need of critical care, according to Indian Health Minister Mansukh Mandavia, who arrived in Odisha state on Sunday morning. Mandavia added that expert doctors, specialized equipment and medicines had been flown in from the Indian capital, New Delhi.

On Sunday, Odisha’s chief minister, Naveen Patnaik, announced compensation of 500,000 rupees ($6,067) for the relatives of those who died and 100,000 rupees ($1,213) for people seriously injured.

“All possible steps have been taken to save the lives of the injured passengers in the various hospitals,” Patnaik said, according to a statement issued by the Information and Public Relations Department of Odisha.

State authorities said a special train service would run on Sunday to take survivors and bodies from Odisha. It will extend to Chennai in the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and will stop at all major stations, with a parcel trolley attached to transport the bodies of the deceased.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who visited the site, praised the local authorities and rescue workers for their work. He also stressed that those responsible for the incident will be brought to justice.

We cannot bring back those we have lost but the government is with them (their families) in their grief. This incident is very serious for the government… whoever is found guilty will be severely punished, Modi said on Saturday, adding that the government will “leave no stone unturned.”

The train crash has raised questions about the safety of the country’s vast, outdated railway network, which the government is investing in to modernize.

India’s extensive railway network, one of the largest in the world, was built over 160 years ago under British colonial rule. Today, it runs about 11,000 trains each day over 67,000 miles of tracks in the world’s most populous country.

The deteriorating infrastructure is often cited as a reason for traffic delays and many train accidents in India. Although government statistics show accidents and derailments have been on the decline in recent years, they are still tragically common.

More than 16,000 people were killed in nearly 18,000 train accidents across the country in 2021. According to national crime records, most rail accidents—67.7%—were caused by falls from trains and collisions between trains and people on the track. Train-on-train collisions are much less common.

In 2005, at least 102 people died when a passenger train derailed in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh while trying to cross flooded tracks. In 2011, dozens were killed when a train jumped onto a railway in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh.

The death toll from Friday’s accident has already surpassed the death toll in another infamous crash in 2016, when more than 140 people were killed in a derailment in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. In the same year, Modi announced huge investments in India’s railway system with the aim of improving safety and connectivity.

In February, Modi inaugurated the first section of a 1,386-kilometre (861-mile) highway linking the capital New Delhi with the financial hub of Mumbai. A dedicated Western Freight Corridor, which aims to decongest India’s railway network, is also under construction. Later this year, the country will inaugurate the Chenab Bridge – the world’s longest railway bridge – in the country’s Jammu and Kashmir region.

Modernizing India’s transport infrastructure is a key priority for Modi in his bid to create a $5 trillion economy by 2025. For the fiscal year that began in April, Modi’s government raised capital spending on airports, road construction, highways and other infrastructure projects to $122 billion, or 1.7% of its GDP.

Much of this spending is aimed at getting more high-speed trains on the notoriously slow railways.

Several major projects have just been completed, or are nearing completion, including the construction of the world’s longest railway bridge in the Jammu and Kashmir region.

Modi was scheduled to inaugurate a new high-speed train, the Vande Bharat Express, on the Saturday before the accident.

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