Rescuers work overnight at Odisha triple rail crash site
As many as 200 ambulances, 50 buses and 45 mobile health units were working at the accident site, besides 1,200 personnel, officials said. The bodies were being taken to the hospitals in all kinds of vehicles, including tractors
Representational image
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 on 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 on Saturday.
As many as 200 ambulances, 50 buses and 45 mobile health units were working at the accident site, besides 1,200 personnel, officials said. The bodies were being taken to the hospitals in all kinds of vehicles, including tractors.
“Death toll 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.
(With inputs from PTI)
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