L’Unità, July 13
“Hell amid the olive trees,” reads Wednesday’s front page of Italian daily L’Unità, describing the head-on train crash near the southern city of Bari that killed at least 27 people and injured 50.
Two local passenger trains traveling in opposite directions on a single-track railway collided at around 11:30 am Tuesday near the town of Corato, in the southern Italian region of Puglia. The crash occurred in an olive grove in the countryside near the city of Bari, and early investigations point towards human error as the cause, although technical failures haven’t been ruled out. Emergency workers continued to comb through the ruins of the crash early Wednesday.
Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi traveled to the crash site by helicopter late Tuesday, and announced an immediate investigation to identify the cause of the crash. “We won’t stop until we clarify what happened,” Renzi told journalists.
While most of the railways in Italy’s network have automatic brake systems, the track where the crash occurred is a privately owned local railway where work to install an automatic system was yet to begin.
