The two crumpled trains “Between the sheets hell” – BBC

the cicadas do not stop for a moment, and insinuate a sense of absurd peace: because here there can be no peace, the bloody sheet metal parts fit together right in the branches of olive trees. The plowed fields all around the tracks, between Corato and Andria, Puglia in the great plain, dampen noise and emotions in an eternal waiting for anything. But now they are dotted with shreds of seats, twisted branches, bags, sheets of paper, bottles of water crushed, mangled toys, small signs of life, death certainties. Here are the top bodies, behold the moans, like after a bomb, “as when a plane crashes,” says Massimo Mazzilli, who in Corato is the mayor. Twenty-seven dead, more than fifty injured including six or seven serious, various dispersed, the s’aggiornano numbers in the night and in the end are not far from those of a plane crash. But here, in the middle of nowhere, you are almost crumbled two loads commuter trains, workers, families, children, people going on vacation and those at work, another to the sea for a day, who by his grandmother, who by his love.

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train accidents in Puglia, all videos

 
 

Andria, the first images of the clash between two trains: 27 dead

 

The accident

I am not yet eleven thirty in the morning when the white-streaked blue Alstom train emerges from the great bend that comes from Corato to two or three hundred meters from the roadhouse of the provincial, unexpected as a latecomer ghost. The yellow train Stadler comes to meet them, on time off from Andria. The old Lorenzo, who retired times of these regional and local has printed them in the head memory, saw out of the station a few minutes before, the Andria train, glittering in that her canary yellow, and have said: “Why it has not yet reached the other train, to Corato?”. It is not a trivial concern, because only in the stations the trains pass, there is the double track, which then becomes unique, just the rails come out in the plain and nothing between the two cities. Because here, in the Puglia industrious who for years has dragged the South’s economy, half of this circuit run by Ferrotramviaria S.p.A., is still, incredibly, a single track: 37 kilometers; There would also be the European funds for doubling, but the race was postponed, you know how these things to us, in this Italy where we focus rightly on Tav but guiltily forget that the South may not have stopped transport to the middle of the last century . The fact is that an advance or a delay, which elsewhere would result in a hello hello from the windows, here you can open wide the gulf, especially if is added an oversight, human error, a switch or a phone lock that they snap. “It’s a time of great sorrow, technically, something went wrong,” almost whispers Massimo Nitti, general manager of the railway company. The tracks, the black boxes, the testimony and the investigation of the Prosecutor they will tell, for now not much changes.

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Apulia, who are the victims of the clash between the two trains between Corato and Andria

 
 

Fulvio Schinzari

 

Drivers

nothing changes even for the two drivers. Luciano, 38, and Pasquale, 54, who in a few days would have to take her daughter to the altar. Must glimpse into a chilling split second, one run to the other, in a stretch where you go a hundred per hour, on those snakes of steel crazed, even have time to mention a stop, only a

whistle the desperate and vain alarm. Alberto La Rosa, a guy who works around here, says “a roar that stuns.” The first two carriages of Stadler disintegrate inside the first two of Alstom, the plates spread through the air in a radius of hundreds of meters, only the last two carriages of the two trains did not explode but merge into one absurd creature made of steel and blood, cries for help and gasps. A mother holds her baby just before the crash: they are among the first to be extracted, the volunteers are struggling to describe without lucciconi that last embrace of death. A farmer, Giuseppe Acquaviva, 55, just in time to lift our eyes to the explosion but can not hide behind his tractor, a splinter kill it, as in war: mocked by bad luck, will be the only victim foreign to two trains.
In an hour the whole Bat province knows that something terrible has happened. The phone rings in the offices of Ferrotramviaria and someone says: “There are one hundred and fifty deaths in the countryside.” In truth, no one can really know how many are dead, because this is a train of subscribers, no one dares even how many there were the passengers. The capacity is a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. The account can be chilling.

Rescuers

In a ‘ now quell’immoto of Apulian countryside piece is stained with yellow towels to cover the first bodies, punctuated by the coffins there, right in between the olive trees, streets quickly brought to the morgue of Bari. the firemen and volunteers ambulance write a big page courage and self-sacrifice, as they begin to arrive the relatives, who were waiting at home their loved ones, friends, incredulous. Decent guy draws near Michele Emiliano, the Governor, who rushed among the first, he says, “I do not move from here until you extract the last passenger.” Emiliano embraces him, the boy is the son of a controller, and asks: “You can know where is Dad?”. A father of Andria, with blue eyes filled with tears, clinging to the twentysomething son looking the other son, who was on the train Corato: “We shot all hospitals, someone tells me what I do now?”, Almost screaming. There are symbols of hope, like little Samuel, 6 years old, extracted almost unscathed from the wreckage and taken immediately by firefighters trying to calm him with a cartoon of a smartphone. There are a mother and a child who were lost in the tragedy and found and riabbracciate in Barletta, in one of the hospitals involved in this enormous relief work.

shadow carousel

 
 

Clash of trains in Puglia, the wagons crumbled and rescue

 

The ‘all quiet’

In these small signs clings each, beyond reason. Until seven o’clock in the evening, volunteers try once more “proof of silence”, requiring “all quiet!” Rescuers, families, journalists, and in return the silence of death, the sign that there is no more no one to be saved, but only remains to be dialed and honor. At that time he has already arrived and is coming Delrio Minister Renzi, “to bring a hug” (someone who oppose it in front of the Prefecture of Bari, “shame, it’s 2016!”).
It goes on into the night. With the photoelectric. A crane. A tractor. It is absurd to divide sheet metal monster now. Because everyone thinks, they fear, that with the other plates there are other broken lives, other dramas for composing. Everyone feels these dramas as its own. In Andria and Trani hospitals, Terlizzi and Bisceglie, throughout this part of Puglia you make queues to donate blood. Many boys. That they look at you and say, “They are our relatives, the ones.”

July 13, 2016 (amendment July 13, 2016 | 08:08 )

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