Greece, Tempe, Greece has stopped amid general strike to commemorate the second anniversary of the country’s worst railway disaster, with 346 protests counted in Greece and overseas.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters join the rally, and some clash with police as tensions grows.
Government services, banks and businesses closed on Friday. The ships did not sail, the trains did not run, and no planes came and went in and out of Greece.
An independent accident report released Thursday cited a series of chronic equipment failures and human errors in the Greek railway system, causing a northbound passenger train to collide head-on with a southbound freight train in Tempe Valley in northern Greece, killing 57 people.
Many of them were young people who returned to the university in Thessaloniki after a three-day weekend. Their loss has transformed the Tempe accident into a symbol of what many Greeks view as the incompetence and lack of accountability of the state.
“For us, it’s not an accident. Nicos Plakias, the father of two students who were killed, told Al Jazeera.
“I think Tempe manages to do something, and at last the politicians will be responsible. I think the politicians will sit on the dock. I think this whole effort has failed if a single politician isn’t called to explain,” Plakias said.
Sisters Tomi and Kraisa Plakia and their cousin Anastasia Maria sat in the car just behind the restaurant’s car, but Plakias believes they would have survived if they hadn’t moved there.
“The girls didn’t have tickets for that car. They were supposed to be in car number 5. In Larissa, many people got off and only 20 people were on board. There were many empty seats and the girls wanted to sit together, so they asked if there was a free compartment before, and they were led to the death compartment.”
Almarata lost her daughter, a medical student in the military.
“We are fighting for the future of our children and for a better society,” she told Al Jazeera. “Everyone has to come out for their children on the 28th. Our kids are gone. They are not back. But we have to fight for the other children.”
The Hellenic Air and Rail Safety Investigation Bureau said Thursday that Greece already suffers from railway safety culture and outdated practices, but the government has exacerbated the problem by mismanaging the financial crisis. He said that serious austerity has prevented the collapse of the state-run Hellenic Railway Agency (OSE) staff and the state-run Hellenic Railway Agency.
It was not the only charge placed at the doors of Greek political elites.
The 2014 contract funded by the European Union to install safety devices throughout the network, known as Contract 717, was not fully undertaken nine years later, experts said.
“Contract 717 was not a specific target for our investigation, but let me say. I’m not referring to OSE ranks and files, I’m referring to senior officials.
Many suspect that the funds are being wasted, and 1.3 million people have signed a petition to strip the Cabinet Minister of immunity, allowing four government transport ministers to be brought to justice.
On the day of the accident alone, the stationmaster placed the train on the collision course within a few kilometres of Larissa, and authorities found many human and technical issues that contributed to the disaster.
The Larissa Stationmaster was not properly trained to use the automated controls installed, so he returned to a manual system that did not show what the train was doing. If he had used it, he would have seen that he inadvertently switched passenger train 62 to a southbound truck.
The north traffic lights of the station, which were fixed under Contract 717, had not broken down. This means that the station master had to give the train engineers permission to go verbally. Recordings of conversations between them show that they did not follow proper oral protocols, the investigator said, and the station master told the engineer to proceed without making sure he was on the southbound truck.
Two sections of Larissa’s north and south tracks returned to singletrack use on the day of the accident due to technical failures. The train engineer would not have thought it was strange that he was on a southbound truck, and he would not have doubted it.
Have you tried to hide it?
The ruling Conservative New Democrats are also accused of attempts to cover up.
“We ran into serious problems during our investigation,” Papajimitriu said. “The transformation of the crash site into a ritual space has resulted in serious evidence being lost.”
The bulk of gravel from the site was bulldozed a few days after crashing, ostensibly rebuilt the truck and restored the rail service, but was rushed.
The victim’s relatives hired the Anubis Coldcase K9 team, specializing in physical recovery. Nine months after the accident, Anubis discovered the body parts of several victims, including the limbs of a girl from Plakias.
It raised suspicions that the government had tried to avoid chemical analysis of the residue left by the fire after the crash.
Surveillance video shows an electric arc that fires two explosions after an impact. “There could be some previously unknown fuel,” the investigator said. “The autopsy at the scene of the accident was then not carried out in a proper way to determine the type of fuel that caused the fireball,” said Bernd Accountu, one of the investigators.
Two official reports released in 2023 by the Hellenic Fire Force and the Ministry of Infrastructure Transport condemned the silicon oil fire leaking from the transformer coils of the locomotive.
The victim’s parents did not believe it and did not commission their own chemical research, indicating that there are potential residues of xylene, a flammable solvent used in paints, varnishes and inks.
Investigators said the fire killed five to seven casualties, but alleged cover-up turned into a lightning bolt of rage among the masses. This accuses the government of intending to protect incompetent loyalists rather than providing safe transportation.
“From the beginning, the government’s stance was an attempt to hide things on a political and public relations level as this happened on March 1. “The government acted amateurishly, fearing political fallout.”
The collision at a total speed of 240 km/h (150 mph) was extremely violent, destroying the passenger train locomotive and the first six cars, experts said.
This is because the passenger train locomotive and the approaching freight train collided with each other and derailed, exposing the passenger train’s restaurant car to a secondary collision with a flatbed car carrying steel sheets. According to the investigation report, the longest and most intense fires were in the cars in the restaurant.
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