Anger mounts as Greece remembers deadliest train crash two years on

Greece, Tempe, has come to a standstill as a result of a general strike that saw 346 protests both domestically and internationally.

As tensions rise, hundreds of thousands of protesters have gathered for rallies. Some are reportedly clashing with police.

On Friday, businesses, banks, and government services were shut down. No planes or ships left Greece or entered the country since the country’s bankruptcy in the post-2009 financial crisis, and no trains or ships ran.

A northbound passenger train and a southbound freight train collided head-on with one another in the Tempe gorge in northern Greece, killing 57 people, according to an independent accident report released on Thursday.

After a three-day weekend away, many of them were young people who were returning to Thessaloniki’s university. The Tempe accident has become a symbol for what many Greeks perceive as state incompetence and lack of accountability as a result of their loss.

It’s not an accident for us, he said. The father of the two murdered students, Nikos Plakias, told Al Jazeera, “It’s a crime.”

“I believe what Tempe has accomplished will be preserved in history forever, that politicians will finally be held accountable,” Tempe said. Politicians will likely be in the dock, in my opinion. I’ll say that this effort was unsuccessful if a single politician wasn’t held accountable, according to Plakias.

If Sisters Thomi and Chrysa Plakia and their cousin Anastasia-Maria had not moved, they might have survived if they had sat in the car directly behind the restaurant car.

“That car didn’t have a ticket for the girls,” they said. In the fifth car, they were supposed to be. In Larissa, many people left and only 20 arrived. The girls asked if there was a free compartment in the front, and they were led into the compartment of death because there were many empty seats and the girls wanted to sit together.

Alma Lata lost her daughter, a medical student serving in the military.

She told Al Jazeera, “We’re fighting for the future of children and a better society.” Everybody should cry out on October 28 for their own children because our children have vanished. They won’t be returning. However, we must unite against other children.

Greece already suffers from a subpar rail safety culture and outdated practices, according to the Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Authority on Thursday, but governments’ mismanagement of the financial crisis only made matters worse. According to the statement, severe austerity measures destroyed the state-owned Hellenic Railways Organisation (OSE) and damaged equipment.

Not just those accusations were made against the political elite of Greece.

Nine years later, according to the experts, a 2014 contract signed by the European Union to install safety equipment throughout the network, known as Contract 717, had not been fully completed.

“Contract 717 was not the specific target of our investigation,” said the authority’s president, Christos Papadimitriou, “but let me say, all those who delayed the implementation of 717 have decisively contributed to the deaths of these children,” he said.

1.3 million people have signed a petition to remove cabinet ministers from four governments so that transport ministers can be tried, despite the widespread suspicion that the funds were squandered.

The authority discovered a number of human and technical issues that contributed to the disaster on the day of the accident alone and within a few kilometers of Larissa, whose stationmaster had set the train on collision course.

The Larissa stationmaster switched to a manual system without any indication of the track trains’ status because he was not properly trained to use the automated controls that had been installed. He would have discovered that he had accidentally switched passenger train 62 to the southbound track had he used it.

The stationmaster had to give train engineers permission to go verbally because a signal north of the station that was supposed to have been fixed by Contract 717 was out of order. According to investigators, the stationmaster told the engineer to proceed without having discovered he was on the southbound track, and the leaks of recordings of their conversation show they didn’t adhere to proper verbal protocol.

Due to technical issues, two sections of the track north and south of Larissa were reverting to single-track use the day of the accident. The train engineer wouldn’t have been offended by the train’s presence on the southbound track.

attempted a cover-up

An attempt was also made to cover up the ruling, traditionally conservative New Democracy party.

Papadimitriou remarked, “We had serious issues with the investigation.” The loss of significant evidence was a result of the crash site’s conversion into a ceremonial space.

Tonnes of the site’s gravel was bulldozed away days after the accident, allegedly to restore rail service and to rebuild the tracks, but because it had been done so quickly, the smashed rolling stock was still containing human remains as it was loaded away.

Anubis Coldcase K9 Team, a company that specializes in body recoveries, was hired by the victims’ relatives. Nine months after the accident, Anubis discovered the body parts of several victims, including the Plakias girls’ extremities.

The government’s quick action made it seem like it was attempting to avoid chemical analysis of the residues left by the crash.

An electric arc causes two explosions to occur after impact, according to surveillance video. The investigators speculated that there might be some fuel that was previously unknown. One of the investigators, Bernd Accou, claimed that the autopsy of the accident site did not follow the proper procedures to determine the type of fuel being transported and the fireball that resulted.

The Hellenic Fire Service and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation jointly blamed the leak of silicon oils from the locomotives’ transformer coils in two official reports released in 2023.

The families of the victims’ loved ones disagreed, so they conducted own chemical studies that discovered potential residues of the flammable solvent xylene, which is used in paints, varnishes, and inks.

Only five to seven of the victims were killed in the fire, according to investigators, but the public is upset about the suspected cover-up, which claims the government is more focused on ensuring safe transportation than protecting incompetent loyalists.

Because this took place on March 1 and we had a general election on May 16, Plakias claimed, “the government’s position was an attempt to cover things up at the political and public relations level from the beginning.” The government “acted amateurishly and was afraid of the political fallout”

According to experts, the collision was so violent that it caused the locomotive and the first six passenger train cars to collide at a combined speed of 240 kilometres per hour (150 miles per hour).

Source: Aljazeera