Aged Railway Fatigue ... Recipe for Disaster
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| Security personnel gather beside the wreckage of a train in Daharki on June 8, 2021. |
"We have not been able to take them [passengers trapped in the train wreckage] out so far, but an operation is underway for that.""We have saved three more people; they are injured."Police officer Umar Tufail
"We felt as if we had been thrown away", an injured passenger recounting how one calamity led to another, said from hospital, of the initial derailing of the train. "The second train then hit our train [and] that caused more damage", he explained. His head bandaged, he said that most of the passengers on his train had been asleep, in the pre-dawn hours when the accident occurred.'
"The driver tried to apply emergency brakes but the locomotive hit the infringing coaches.""The track has got issues on several points. The coaches are old, some as old as 40 years.""I've told high-ups several times: 'Please do something about it'."Tariq Latif, railway official
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| At least 62 people are now confirmed to have died in the crash Reuters |
There were two trains involved in yet another accident on Pakistan's decaying rail system. They were carrying 1,388 passengers between them. The train that smashed into the derailed carriages of the first train to run amok on Monday succeeded in amassing an on-the-scene death toll of 36 people. These catastrophic train accidents serve to focus on the decrepit state of a 19th century railway system awaiting upgraded modernization.
There were still passengers trapped in mangled coaches tossed like broken toys across the tracks located in the southern province of Sindh. While 36 people were outright killed, four additional bodies could be viewed in the wreckage. Over 70 passengers were admitted to various hospitals. According to a Pakistan Railways spokesman, several carriages of the first train had spilled across adjacent tracks after the Ghotki district derailment.
It took but minutes, before the passengers, much less the train crew could react, before the second train arriving from the opposite direction and smashed into the scattered, spilled train cars. A comprehensive investigation is to be launched into Pakistan's railway safety, with the country's Information Minister blaming the crash on the previous government's corruption, No word on what the present government's actions over the years it has been in power has done to improve the situation.
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| Railway workers use crane to remove wreckage to clear the track at the site of a train collision in the Ghotki district, southern Pakistan, Tuesday, June 8, 2021. (AP Photo/Fareed Khan) |
Labels: Aging Infrastructure 'No-Fault' Government, Pakistan, Railroad Accident
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, June 10, 2021
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