Train Crash Kills 233 People, Injures Over 900 Others In Eastern India

• Death toll rising after passenger service derails, collides with train in Odisha state

At least 233 people have been reportedly killed and about 900 others injured after two passenger trains collided in the eastern Indian state of Odisha.

The incident is the country’s deadliest rail accident in more than a decade and official reports indicated that the Coromandel Express, which runs from Kolkata to Chennai, collided with another passenger train, the Howrah Superfast Express, at about 7 pm local time.

South Eastern Railway authorities said on Friday that the Howrah Superfast Express derailed and crashed into the Coromandel Express, even as media reports had earlier said the crash was between the Coromandel Express and a goods train.

The death toll was expected to increase, the State Chief Secretary, Pradeep Jena, said in a tweet and further disclosed that more than 200 ambulances were called to the scene in Odisha’s Balasore district and 100 additional doctors had been mobilised on top of 80 already there.

According to the Director General of the fire department in Odisha, Sudhanshu Sarangi, about 207 bodies had been recovered so far.

One of the survivors told local television news that he had been sleeping when the accident happened and woke to find himself trapped under about a dozen passengers before crawling out from the carriage with only injuries to his neck and arm.

SK Panda, a spokesperson in Jena’s office in Odisha state, called it “a heavy accident”, adding; “We expect that the rescue work will continue till at least tomorrow morning. On our part, we have prepared all big government and private hospitals from the accident site to the state capital to cater to the injured.”

Panda also said “many buses” had been deployed to transport the injured passengers and survivors from the site to the nearest hospitals for treatment.

Meanwhile, Reuters reported that authorities provided conflicting accounts on which train derailed first and have so far made no official statements about possible causes.

Images from the scene showed rescuers climbing up the mangled wreck of one of the trains to find survivors while hundreds of young people lined up outside a government hospital in the city of Soro in Odisha to donate blood.

A witness told Reuters; “I was there at the site and I can see blood, broken limbs, and people dying around me.”

Speaking on the unfortunate incident, the Odisha Chief Minister, Naveen Patnaik, said authorities’ priority was “removing the living to the hospitals, that’s our first concern, to look after the living”.

Rescue operations were underway at the site and “all possible assistance” was being given to those affected, the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, said and further tweeted; “In this hour of grief, my thoughts are with the bereaved families. May the injured recover soon.”

Rescue teams have been mobilised from Odisha’s Bhubaneswar and Kolkata in West Bengal, the Federal Minister for Railways, Ashwini Vaishnaw, said, adding that the National Disaster Response Force, state government teams, and the Air Force had also mobilised to respond to the incident with hundreds of fire department personnel, police officers, and sniffer dogs are also involved.

At Bhadrak district hospital, ambulances brought in casualties, with the bloodied and shocked survivors receiving treatment in crowded wards.

Despite government efforts to improve safety, several hundred accidents occur every year on India’s railways, which with 40,000 miles (64,000km) of track is the world’s largest network under one management.

Two trains collided near Delhi in August 1995, killing 358 people in the worst train accident in India’s history. Most train accidents are blamed on human error or outdated signaling equipment. More than 12 million people travel on 14,000 trains a day across India. – With the Guardian report