Wielding gas torches and electric cutters, rescuers worked through the night to pull out survivors and the dead from the mangled steel of three trains that derailed one top of another in a horrific sequence, killing at least 233 people and injuring more than 900 in Odisha’s Balasore district, officials and witnessed said today.
Officials in Bhubaneswar said 200 ambulances, 50 buses and 45 mobile health units were working at the accident site, besides 1,200 personnel. The bodies were being taken to the hospitals in all kinds of vehicles, including tractors.
“Death count rises to 233 in the Balasore Train Accident,” Odisha Chief Secretary PK Jena tweeted.
The train crash, the fourth deadliest in India according to available records, happened near the Bahanaga Baazar station in Balasore district, about 250 km south of Kolkata and 170 km north of Bhubaneswar, around 7 pm on Friday.
Several coaches of the 12864 Bengaluru-Howrah Superfast Express, on the way to Howrah, derailed and fell on adjacent tracks, an official said.
“These derailed coaches collided with the 12841 Shalimar-Chennai Central Coromandel Express and its coaches capsized too,” he said. A goods train was also involved in the accident as some of the coaches of the Coromandel Express, which was heading to Chennai, hit its wagons after getting derailed, he added.
Gas cutters were used to extricate the bodies from under the derailed coaches. Disaster management personnel and firemen were busy at work trying to extricate bodies as dawn broke on this tiny way station on the east coast railway line.
“Some of the scenes at the site were too gory to describe,” said a passenger.
Railway tracks were almost destroyed at the spot as mangled coaches lay strewn all over, with some having mounted on another, while a few coaches turned turtle due to the impact.
Pijush Poddar, a resident of Berhampore in West Bengal’s Murshidabad district, was travelling to Tamil Nadu in the Coromandel Express to join work there when the accident happened.
“We were jolted and suddenly saw the train bogie turn on one side. Many of us were thrown out of the compartment by the momentum of the derailment. When we managed to crawl out, we found bodies lying all around,” he said.
Locals said they heard consecutive loud sounds, following which they rushed to the spot and found the derailed coaches, which were nothing but “a mangled heap of steel”.
“The local people really went out on a limb to help us… They not only helped in pulling out people but retrieved our luggage and got us water, ” Rupam Banerjee, one of the passengers, told reporters.
One of the coaches “was pushed into the ground ” as another from a neighbouring train collapsed on top of it, passengers said.
Work is on to try and extricate that particular bogie and retrieve the dead in it. “This will push up the deth toll significantly,” a state disaster relief officer said.
Balasore district hospital looked like a war zone with the injured lying on stretchers in the corridor and rooms bursting at its seams with extra beds propped up.
Harried medical staff were seen trying to bring succour to patients many of whom are from states other than Odisha and had difficulties in communicating.