Toll rises to 111 in Delta Fast tragedy

P Hareesh / TNN / Oct 31, 2005, 02:15 IST

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With the recovery of eight more bodies, the toll rose to 111 in Saturday's train accident near Valigonda.

VALIGONDA (NALGONDA DISTICT): With the recovery of eight more bodies from the mangled remains of the Repalle-Secunderabad Delta Fast Passenger and from the Gollacheruvu stream on Sunday, the toll rose to 111 in Saturday's train accident near Valigonda in Nalgonda district.
The search operation, which was halted on Saturday night, resumed in the morning, with rescue personnel from the Army and the police nursing poignant but unrealistic hopes of finding someone still alive in the stricken compartments.
Army personnel found three bodies crouched in desperate agony in the mangled compartments and retrieved five others that had been washed away downstream.
Three of the bodies were identified by relatives, by now numb with grief but stunned by the final realisation all the same.

Ten divers had been requisitioned from the naval base in Visakhapatnam to extricate bodies suspected of having been pinned down under water by the derailed compartments.
But the rivulet, which had assumed such a diabolic form on Saturday, had shrunk back to its innocuous self on Sunday, leaving the divers with little to do.
The frogmen were therefore sent downstream to the Tummaleru cheruvu to search for bodies that may have been washed that far. They found none.

After concluding that there were no more bodies to be retrieved, SCR personnel got to work with their acetylene cutters and hacksaws to dismantle the mangled coaches.
Piece by piece, cranes hefted the debris aside, laying open the sad entrails of a tragic journey��a child's slipper, a crushed tiffin carrier and railway platform knick-knacks.
Irresistibly drawn to the scene, local villagers thronged the site and watched in a hush as elements of Saturday's sadness were picked up, assorted and set aside.
Wiser after the fact, South Central Railway (SCR) officiating general manager Thomas Verghese said it would take a week to restore rail traffic on the affected section.
"We'll build a temporary bridge first, and then a permanent one, in three months. We will widen the culvert from 6 m now to 10-15 m," he said.
The narrow culvert caused the floodwaters from the breached Gollacheruvu to build up to a head which washed away the bridge in the early hours of Saturday. This was the direct cause of the mishap to Delta Fast Passenger.

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