Authorities are trying to find ice containers to help preserve bodies while urging families to identify the dead.
Indian authorities have appealed to families to help identify more than 100 unclaimed bodies held in hospitals and morgues after 275 people died in the country’s deadliest train crash in at least two decades.
Tragedy struck on Friday when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, jumped the rails and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near Balasore district in the eastern state of Odisha.
About 100 bodies remained to be identified until Monday evening, a senior health department official told Reuters news agency.
Al Jazeera’s Um-e-Kulsoom, reporting from the capital Bhubaneswar, said there was a desperate situation at a medical facility in the city where most of the bodies were brought in after the train crash.
“If she [relatives] find a body, they think it’s a matter of relief because it’s closure,” she said. “They can take the body home and give a final discharge. For others, the search continues.”
Bijay Kumar Mohapatra, health director of Odisha, said authorities were trying to buy ice containers to help preserve the bodies.
“Unless they are identified, no autopsy can be performed,” said Mohapatra, who explained that according to Odisha state regulations, no autopsy can be performed on an unclaimed body until 96 hours have passed.
At Bhubaneswar’s largest hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), large television screens showed pictures of the dead to help desperate families who are scouring hospitals and mortuaries for friends and relatives.
A detailed list of distinguishing features was made for each body, but family members could first view photos, no matter how gruesome, to identify missing loved ones, a senior police official told Reuters.
The trains had passengers from several states and officials from seven states were in Balasore to help people claim the bodies and bring them home, the police official added.
A lost Parbati Hembrum, from Hooghly district in West Bengal, stood at the help desk of Balasore railway station, seeking information about her son Gopal.
The 20-year-old had traveled in the Coromandel Express with three others from their village, but while the other three returned home, Gopal has not.
Tarapada Tudu, who was standing with his relative Hembrum, said Gopal was taken to Balasore Hospital after the accident, but when they searched for him there, the hospital said he was released the same day after being treated for minor injuries.
But filled with fear about the lack of contact with Gopal, Tudu said that he and Hembrum will travel to Bhubaneswar to look for him among the dead.
A team from the federal Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) reached the site on Tuesday to launch an investigation into the cause of the disaster, while a separate investigation by the railroad’s safety commission began on Monday.
“The CBI team is on the scene and is picking up information on what happened, how it happened and who is behind it,” said Al Jazeera’s Um-e-Kulsoom.
A signal failure was the likely cause of the disaster, according to preliminary findings, which showed that the Coromandel Express, traveling south from Kolkata to Chennai, veered off the main line and entered a loop lane – a side lane used to park trains – with a speed of 128 km/h. (80 mph), crashing into the stationary freight train.
That crash caused the engine and the first four or five carriages of the Coromandel Express to jump the rails, overturn and hit the last two carriages of the Yesvantpur-Howrah train traveling in the opposite direction at 79 mph (126 km/h). mph) on the second main track.
After non-stop efforts to rescue survivors and clear and repair the track, trains resumed running on that section of the line on Sunday evening.