Tempe, Greece – Greece has come to a standstill throughout a basic 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 had 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 folks.
A lot of them had been younger folks returning to college in Thessaloniki after a three-day weekend. Their loss has turned the Tempe accident into a logo 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 had been killed, instructed Al Jazeera.
“I feel what Tempe has managed to do will stay in historical past – that in the end, politicians will probably be held accountable. I imagine politicians will sit within the dock. If a single politician isn’t known as to account, I’ll say this complete effort has failed,” Plakias mentioned.
Sisters Thomi and Chrysa Plakia and their cousin Anastasia-Maria had been sitting within the automobile straight behind the restaurant automobile and would have survived if that they had not moved there, Plakias believes.
“The ladies didn’t have a ticket for that automobile. They had been speculated to be in automobile quantity 5. In Larissa, a number of folks acquired off and solely 20 acquired on. There have been many empty seats, and the women wished to take a seat collectively, so that they requested if there was a free compartment up entrance, and so they had been led into the compartment of demise.”
Alma Lata misplaced her daughter, a medical pupil within the armed forces.
“We’re combating for youngsters’s future, for a greater society,” she instructed Al Jazeera. “Everybody wants to come back out on the twenty eighth for their very own kids, … Our kids are gone. They’re not coming again. However we should combat 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 employees and left tools to decay, it mentioned.
These weren’t the one costs 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 called 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 had been squandered, and 1.3 million folks have signed a petition to strip cupboard ministers of immunity so transport ministers throughout 4 governments might be tried.
On the day of the accident alone, and inside just a few 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 had 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 beneath 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 observe correct verbal protocol, investigators mentioned, and the stationmaster instructed 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 had been bulldozed away days after the crash, ostensibly to rebuild the tracks and restore rail service, nevertheless it was so rapidly achieved, the smashed rolling inventory nonetheless held human stays because it was hoisted away.
Relations 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 women, 9 months after the accident.
The federal government’s haste raised suspicion it was making an attempt to keep away from chemical evaluation of residues left by a fireplace after the crash.
Surveillance video exhibits an electrical arc igniting two explosions after affect. “There’s a attainable presence of a hitherto unknown gasoline,” the investigators mentioned. “The post-mortem of the accident website was not achieved in a correct manner to have the ability to establish afterwards the kind of gasoline that was transported and brought on the fireball,” mentioned Bernd Accou, one of many investigators.
Two official studies launched in 2023 from the Hellenic Fireplace Service and the Ministry of Infrastructure and Transportation blamed the fireplace on silicon oils leaking from the locomotives’ transformer coils.
Victims’ family members 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 hearth killed solely 5 to seven of the victims, investigators mentioned, however the suspected cover-up has turn into a lightning rod for anger among the many public, which accuses the federal government of being extra intent on defending incompetent loyalists than offering secure transport.
“The federal government stance from the very starting was an try and cowl issues up on the political and public relations stage as a result of this occurred March 1 and on Could 16 we had a basic election,” Plakias mentioned. “The federal government was afraid of the political fallout and behaved amateurishly.”
The collision at a mixed velocity of 240 kilometres per hour (150 miles per hour) was so violent, it destroyed the locomotive and first six automobiles 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 automobiles carrying metal plates. It was within the restaurant automobile that the fireplace burned longest and most violently, the investigative report mentioned.
