BALASORE, India - The Indian authorities made fervent appeals to families on Tuesday to help identify 83 unclaimed bodies in hospitals and mortuaries after the death toll in the country’s deadliest rail crash in over two decades rose to 288.
The disaster struck on Friday, when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the tracks and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore in the eastern state of Odisha.
Dr Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, said the authorities were trying to source ice containers to help preserve the bodies.
“Unless they are identified, a post-mortem cannot be done,” Dr Mohapatra said, explaining that under Odisha state regulations, no autopsy can be conducted on an unclaimed body until after 96 hours.
The state government revised the death toll upwards to 288, from 275 earlier, and said that 205 dead bodies have been identified and handed over. The remaining 83 will be preserved, Odisha chief secretary Pradeep Jena said.
At state capital Bhubaneswar’s biggest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, large television screens displayed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.
A detailed list was made of distinguishing features for each body, but relatives could first view photographs, however gruesome, to identify missing loved ones, a senior police official told Reuters.
The trains had passengers from several states and officials from seven states were in Balasore to help people claim the bodies and take the dead home, the police official added.
A forlorn Madam Parbati Hembrum, from West Bengal’s Hooghly district, stood near the help desk at the Balasore railway station, looking for information on her son Gopal.
The 20-year-old had travelled in the Coromandel Express with three others from their village, but while the other three returned home, Gopal has not.
Madam Hembrum was with her relative, Mr Tarapada Tudu, who said that Gopal had apparently been admitted to a Balasore hospital after the accident, but when they looked for him there, the hospital said he had been released the same day after being treated for minor injuries.
But, filled with dread over the lack of contact with Gopal, Mr Tudu said he and Madam Hembrum will travel to Bhubaneswar to look for him among the dead.
A team from the federal Central Bureau of Investigation reached the site on Tuesday to start a probe into the cause of the disaster, while a separate inquiry by railway’s safety commission started on Monday.
A signalling failure was the likely cause of the disaster, according to preliminary findings, which indicated the Coromandel Express, heading south towards Chennai from Kolkata, moved off the main line and entered a loop track – a side track used to park trains – at 128kmh, crashing into the stationary freight train.
That crash caused the engine and first four or five coaches of the Coromandel Express to jump the tracks, topple and hit the last two coaches of the Yeshwantpur-Howrah train heading in the opposite direction at 126kmh on the second main track.
Following non-stop efforts to rescue survivors and clear and repair the track, trains resumed running over that section of the line on Sunday night. REUTERS
