Greece’s THESSALONIKI (AP) — Rescue personnel searched “centimeter by centimeter” through the wreckage of a passenger train on Thursday after a head-on crash in northern Greece that left at least 57 people dead. The country’s train system is allegedly in a perilous state as a result of years of underfunding, which is what rail workers are protesting by going on strike.
Late on Tuesday, a passenger train and a freight train collided, crumpling coaches into twisted steel tangles and forcing passengers to shatter windows to escape. 48 people were still hospitalized after the country’s deadliest crash in history, the most of them in the city of Larissa in central Greece. Among them, six were receiving intensive care.
The depressing recovery effort is moving forward “centimeter by centimeter,” according to Fire Service spokesman Yiannis Artopios.
“There are more (body) people there, as we can see. Regrettably, the crash has left them in extremely poor health, Artopios said on state television.
employees claim the train system is unsafe
The accident’s exact cause is still unknown. A judicial investigation is trying to determine why the two trains were going in the opposite directions on the same track when they collided, and the station manager at Larissa who was detained after the accident was charged on Wednesday with multiple counts of manslaughter and causing serious physical harm through negligence.
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.
