Spain started three days of official mourning on Thursday after two high-speed trains collided near the town of Urda, killing 68 people and injuring more than a hundred others, according to The Guardian. It is the second fatal high-speed rail accident in the country this year.
The crash happened on Wednesday morning on the line running from Madrid to Andalusia in the south. A train operated by the state-owned company Renfe struck the rear of a train run by the private operator Iryo after the Iryo service had stopped, and the impact pushed several carriages off the tracks.
Officials said 107 people required hospital treatment, among them 15 whose condition was described as serious. The death toll was reported at 68.
Why it matters
The collision has raised hard questions about safety on a network that Spain has long treated as a point of national pride. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez said it was not acceptable for a country like Spain to endure two high-speed train accidents within one year, The Guardian reported.
Sánchez said investigators were still working to establish the cause. If the inquiry found that security systems had failed or that negligence played a part, he said, those problems would be dealt with severely.
The political pressure extends beyond the government. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who leads the opposition People's party, called for an immediate inquiry and for a full and independent examination of the country's rail infrastructure. Spaniards, he said, have a right to know the state of the system they rely on.
Overnight search and efforts to identify the dead
Rescue crews worked through the night at the site, using cranes to lift twisted sections of metal as they looked for further victims, Agence France-Presse reported. Emiliano García-Page, who heads the regional government of Castilla-La Mancha, told reporters on Wednesday that the toll could rise because rescue teams had not yet been able to reach the bottom of the carriages.
The Civil Guard opened four offices, in Madrid, Toledo, Córdoba and Seville, where relatives can give DNA samples to assist with identifying the dead. Blood donation points were set up in Castilla-La Mancha and Madrid.
In Urda, a village roughly 130km (80 miles) south of the capital, a school was turned into a centre where families could ask for information about missing passengers. Red Cross teams were on hand to support the groups arriving there, some of them in tears.
Carmen Garcia, a Red Cross psychologist, said the coming period would be long and difficult, and that each person would cope in their own manner. She described people in shock who had not yet absorbed what had happened, alongside others who were angry, grieving or anxious, and said the mourning process would be complicated.
The first victim to be publicly named was José Manuel Chacón, a 31-year-old Civil Guard officer. The agency offered its condolences to his family, friends and colleagues. Spanish media reported that those unaccounted for included a former minister from the People's party and a number of foreign nationals who were probably in the country on holiday.
A second crash in a single year
The accident is the second major high-speed collision Spain has recorded this year, a fact that has shaped both the official response and the public reaction. The line between Madrid and Andalusia is one of the busiest long-distance routes in the country, and the crash involved operators from both the state sector and the private sector that runs services on the same tracks.
The Guardian reported that the cause of the collision remained under investigation as of Thursday. No findings have been released.
What happens next will hinge on the inquiry. Investigators must determine why one train was stopped on the line and why the second was unable to avoid it, and the answers will decide whether the government's promised scrutiny of safety systems leads to changes in how the network is run.
