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The Greek government has said that rail projects in the country have been beset by “chronic public sector ills”, amid growing anger over how Tuesday night’s head-on crash between two trains could have happened.
In the first official public admission of the problems plaguing the railway network, officials also conceded that efforts by the centre-right administration to overhaul the system had failed.
“We are all devastated by this tragic incident,” a government spokesperson, Giannis Oikonomou, told a news conference as the death toll rose to 57. “The loss and trauma this caused, the physical and mental trauma of survivors, and the angst of this country is huge, and it’s difficult to manage, particularly now.”
As rescue teams resumed the painstaking process of looking for the dead in the worst-damaged wagons, Oikonomou said authorities would look into the causes of the accident and delays in implementing rail projects, which he said were “rooted in chronic ills of the Greek public [sector] … which the government has not managed to eradicate”.
Highlighting the mounting sense of fury over the crash, which happened outside Tempe in central Greece, protesters hurled rocks at rail company offices in Athens on Wednesday evening, before being dispersed by volleys of teargas fired by riot police. Protests also broke out in Thessaloniki.
On Thursday, railway and metro workers went on strike. In a statement, Hellenic Train services said the 24-hour strike had been called to protest against the “disrespect that [successive] governments have shown towards the Greek railroads which led to the tragic result in Tempe”.
Hellenic Train was among the many public utilities privatised at the height of Greece’s long-running debt crisis.
Meanwhile, a Greek magistrate called for an urgent inquiry into allegations that a long stretch of track leading to Athens international airport, used by millions of foreign tourists every year, is operated with inadequate signalling. The charges were made by the Federation of Railroad employees, which went on TV to call for action.
The rescue operation has been made especially difficult because workers have had to rely on special cutting machines to disentangle the mangled wreckage.
At the time of the crash, at 11.20pm on Tuesday, several students were believed to have gathered in the restaurant car, in the second carriage, which had felt the full force of the head-on collision. They had boarded the Thessaloniki-bound night train in the Greek capital after a three-day holiday weekend.
“It was a student train, full of kids … in their 20s,” Costas Bargiotas, a senior orthopaedic doctor at the hospital, told Skai TV. “It was truly shocking … the carriages crumpled like paper.”
Although the search is expected to continue in the days ahead, any prospect of finding survivors has all but evaporated, emergency workers said, saying temperatures would have exceeded 1,300C in the front two carriages that exploded into flames.
Witnesses who rushed to the site of the accident, 235 miles north of Athens, discovered a scene of devastation. Passengers who managed to flee the train, or were ejected through carriage windows, spoke of chaos and panic. One survivor described the terror of having to make a split-second decision of “either being burned alive or jumping and breaking all my bones”. She was among 66 injured people taken to hospital. At least six of the wounded are on life support.
The grim process of identifying the victims has been made more complicated, media reports said, because forensic scientists, for the most part, have only had incinerated body parts to work with. Relatives desperately seeking loved ones have been forced to provide DNA samples so corpses can be matched and handed to families.
Greece has been plunged into nationwide grief, with the prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, ordering that flags fly at half-mast for the official three-day mourning period.
“We are living through especially dark days for our country,” said the newly assigned transport minister, Giorgos Gerapetritis, addressing reporters as he replaced Kostas Karamanlis, who resigned from the post “in memory of the victims” on Wednesday. “After this tragic accident, the country is going through extremely hard times.”
Mitsotakis has promised an independent investigation, with an all-party committee of experts.
The stationmaster at Larissa, the nearest city to the crash site, assumes some responsibility for the disaster but other factors were also at play, his lawyer said.
Stefanos Pantzartzidis told reporters that his client, who was arrested in the hours following the crash, has been charged with disrupting transport and putting lives at risk. “He is literally devastated,” Pantzartzidis said. “Since the first moment, he has assumed responsibility proportionate to him ... [but] there has been convergent negligence by many other factors.”
Although Mitsotakis and others in his administration have been quick to blame “human error”, there is a growing and widespread belief that the tragedy could have been prevented.
“It is not a mistake, it’s a crime,” the opposition Syntaktwn newspaper said in a banner frontpage headline, saying railway unions had long warned of the system’s inherent dangers.
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