Tempe, Greece – Greece has come to a standstill throughout a normal strike marking the second anniversary of the nation’s worst rail catastrophe with 346 protests counted in Greece and overseas.
Authorities providers, banks and companies have been shuttered on Friday. Ships didn’t sail, trains didn’t run and no planes left or entered Greece – a stoppage not seen because the days of the nation’s chapter within the post-2009 monetary disaster.
An unbiased accident report launched on Thursday cited a litany of power tools failures and human errors within the Greek railway system that led a northbound passenger prepare to collide head-on with a southbound freight prepare within the Tempe gorge in northern Greece, killing 57 individuals.
Lots of them have been younger individuals returning to school in Thessaloniki after a three-day weekend. Their loss has turned the Tempe accident into an emblem of what many Greeks see as state incompetence and lack of accountability.
“For us, it’s not an accident. It’s a criminal offense,” Nikos Plakias, father of two college students who have been killed, advised Al Jazeera.
“I believe what Tempe has managed to do will stay in historical past – that in the end, politicians will likely be held accountable. I imagine politicians will sit within the dock. If a single politician isn’t referred to as to account, I’ll say this entire effort has failed,” Plakias mentioned.
Sisters Thomi and Chrysa Plakia and their cousin Anastasia-Maria have been sitting within the automobile instantly behind the restaurant automobile and would have survived if they’d not moved there, Plakias believes.
“The ladies didn’t have a ticket for that automobile. They have been alleged to be in automobile quantity 5. In Larissa, plenty of individuals acquired off and solely 20 acquired on. There have been many empty seats, and the ladies needed to take a seat collectively, so that they requested if there was a free compartment up entrance, they usually have been led into the compartment of dying.”
Alma Lata misplaced her daughter, a medical scholar within the armed forces.
“We’re preventing for youngsters’s future, for a greater society,” she advised Al Jazeera. “Everybody wants to return out on the twenty eighth for their very own kids, … Our youngsters are gone. They’re not coming again. However we should battle for the opposite kids.”
The Hellenic Air and Rail Security Investigation Authority mentioned on Thursday that Greece already suffered from a poor rail security tradition and outdated practices however governments made issues worse by mismanaging the monetary disaster. Extreme austerity insurance policies gutted the state-owned Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) of workers and left tools to decay, it mentioned.
These weren’t the one fees laid on the door of Greece’s political elite.
A 2014 contract funded by the European Union to put in security tools all through the community, often known as Contract 717, had not been absolutely carried out 9 years later, the consultants mentioned.
“Contract 717 was not the precise goal of our investigation, however let me say, and I’m not referring to OSE rank and file however to senior officers, all those that delayed the implementation of 717 have decisively contributed to the deaths of those kids,” mentioned the authority’s president, Christos Papadimitriou.
Many individuals suspect funds have been squandered, and 1.3 million individuals have signed a petition to strip cupboard ministers of immunity so transport ministers throughout 4 governments could be tried.
On the day of the accident alone, and inside a number of kilometres of Larissa, whose stationmaster put the prepare on a collision course, the authority discovered a slew of human and technical issues that contributed to the catastrophe.
The Larissa stationmaster was not correctly educated to make use of the automated controls that had been put in, so he reverted to a guide system that didn’t present him what observe trains have been on. Had he used it, he would have seen that he had inadvertently switched passenger prepare 62 to the southbound observe.
A sign north of the station that was meant to have been mounted underneath Contract 717 was out of order, which means the stationmaster needed to give prepare engineers permission to go verbally. Leaked recordings of the dialog between them present they didn’t comply with correct verbal protocol, investigators mentioned, and the stationmaster advised the engineer to proceed with out having ascertained he was on the southbound observe.
Two sections of observe north and south of Larissa had reverted to single-track use on the day of the accident due to technical failures. The prepare engineer wouldn’t have thought it odd that he was on the southbound observe, and he didn’t query it.
Tried cover-up?
The ruling conservative New Democracy celebration has additionally been accused of an tried cover-up.
“We encountered severe issues within the investigation,” Papadimitriou mentioned. “The transformation of the crash website right into a ceremonial house led to the lack of severe proof.”
Tonnes of gravel from the positioning have been bulldozed away days after the crash, ostensibly to rebuild the tracks and restore rail service, nevertheless it was so unexpectedly accomplished, the smashed rolling inventory nonetheless held human stays because it was hoisted away.
Kinfolk of the victims employed Anubis Coldcase K9 Workforce, which specialises in physique recoveries. Anubis discovered physique components of a number of victims, together with extremities of the Plakias ladies, 9 months after the accident.
The federal government’s haste raised suspicion it was attempting to keep away from chemical evaluation of residues left by a hearth after the crash.
Surveillance video exhibits an electrical arc igniting two explosions after impression. “There’s a doable presence of a hitherto unknown gasoline,” the investigators mentioned. “The post-mortem of the accident website was not accomplished in a correct method to have the ability to establish afterwards the kind of gasoline that was transported and triggered the fireball,” mentioned Bernd Accou, one of many investigators.
Two official reviews launched in 2023 from the Hellenic Fireplace Service and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation blamed the hearth on silicon oils leaking from the locomotives’ transformer coils.
Victims’ relations didn’t imagine that and commissioned chemical research of their very own, which confirmed there have been potential residues of xylene, a flammable solvent utilized in paints, varnishes and inks.
The fireplace killed solely 5 to seven of the victims, investigators mentioned, however the suspected cover-up has turn out to be a lightning rod for anger among the many public, which accuses the federal government of being extra intent on defending incompetent loyalists than offering protected transport.
“The federal government stance from the very starting was an try to cowl issues up on the political and public relations degree as a result of this occurred March 1 and on Might 16 we had a normal election,” Plakias mentioned. “The federal government was afraid of the political fallout and behaved amateurishly.”
The collision at a mixed pace of 240 kilometres per hour (150 miles per hour) was so violent, it destroyed the locomotive and first six vehicles of the passenger prepare, consultants mentioned.
That’s as a result of the locomotives of the passenger prepare and the oncoming freight prepare derailed as they smashed into one another, exposing the passenger prepare’s restaurant automobile to a secondary collision with flatbed vehicles carrying metal plates. It was within the restaurant automobile that the hearth burned longest and most violently, the investigative report mentioned.
