Thessaloniki: Emergency crews cut through the mangled metal panelling of a passenger train on Thursday, progressing “centimeter by centimeter” in their efforts to pull more bodies from the burned wreckage of a head-on collision in northern Greece that left at least 43 people dead.
Rail workers went on strike to protest years of underfunding they say has left the country’s rail system in a dangerous state. The passenger train and a freight train slammed into each other late Tuesday, crumpling carriages into twisted steel knots and forcing people to smash windows to escape.
It was the country’s deadliest crash ever, and more than 50 people remained hospitalized, most in the central Greek city of Larissa, six of them in intensive care.
Fire Service spokesman Yiannis Artopios said the grim recovery effort was proceeding “centimeter by centimeter”. “We can see that there are more (bodies) people there. Unfortunately they are in a very bad condition because of the collision,” Artopios told state television.
The cause of the crash is still not clear. A station manager arrested after the collision was charged on Wednesday with multiple counts of
manslaughter and causing serious physical harm through negligence, as a judicial inquiry tries to establish why the two trains were travelling in opposite directions on the same track. Railway workers’ associations, meanwhile, called strikes, halting national rail services and the subway in Athens.
They are protesting working conditions and what they described as a dangerous failure to modernize the Greek rail system due to a lack of public investment during the deep financial crisis that spanned most of the previous decade and brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy.