BAHANAGA: Maniklal Tewari was resting on his berth in Coromandel Express when he heard a loud bang around 7 pm on Friday. The Balasore native initially thought it was an explosion. Within moments, everything went dark and his coach was filled with smoke. It all happened in the blink of an eye — a nightmarish five seconds, as he puts it.
“The coach had overturned and an iron bar hit my head. It was a matter of five seconds. When I regained my senses, I realised I was bleeding. My side of the window was broken and it was difficult to get out in that moment of near death experience,” Tewari says, still unable to believe he escaped death. He managed to wriggle out of the window on the other side and saw locals who immediately pulled him out to safety.
Not everyone had that stroke of luck. Asit Maity from East Medinipur is frantically looking for five fellow villagers with whom he had boarded the ill-fated train. They were all on their way to Kerala. While he identified one, others are still missing.
As a mountain of iron debris piled up at Bahanaga Bazar railway station in what is India’s worst railway disaster involving three trains, cries for help rent the air. Locals and rescue workers even had to walk on body parts strewn across the site. Some of the scenes were too gory to describe as mutilated bodies without head, hands or legs were found on the tracks.
Nabin Chandra Soren, living in a thatched house right next to the track where the mishap occurred, rushed out of his house hearing the explosive collision. What he saw left him numbed. “Body of a loco pilot was lying near the boundary of my house. I kept it aside and along with my wife rushed to the tracks to rescue others trapped in the coaches,” Soren said.
It was chaos and despair all around as trapped passengers screamed for help but rescue teams were either unable to move the capsized coaches or cut iron railings due to lack of required machinery and gas cutters in the first few hours of the tragedy.