Posted on 02/18/2004 8:06:32 PM PST by mylife
200 killed, 400 hurt, as runaway train cars blow up
TEHERAN - A freight train carrying fuel and industrial chemicals ran out of control and exploded in north-eastern Iran, killing more than 200 people, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency.
Hundreds of others were injured and five villages devasted by the explosions.
Top Neyshabur city officials - including the local governor, mayor and fire chief were among the dead, along with 182 fire and rescue workers.
Homes, mainly small mud houses, collapsed from the force of the explosion in villages near the train tracks.
The freight train cars - hauling sulphur, fuel oil and fertilisers - blew up outside the city of Neyshabur, 650km east of Teheran, the capital, Irna reported.
'The whole city is shocked by this accident. Official vehicles mounted with loudspeakers are roaming the city, calling for volunteers to donate blood,' editor Saeed Kaviani, from Sobh-e-Neyshabur, a paper that comes out three times a week, said in a phone interview.
Dozens of people remain buried under the rubble of their homes in the villages, the editor said.
The disaster began when 51 freight cars, which were waiting at the Abu Muslim train station near Neyshabur, were set in motion by 'some vibrations', the agency reported without elaborating.
The train cars, picking up speed and moving without an engine or anyone in control, overturned when they reached Khayyam, the next stop, starting a blaze. It was not immediately clear how far the cars had travelled.
As firefighters tackled the fires, the carriages exploded. The blasts were so great that windows were reported to have been shattered within a radius of more than 10km.
Senior official Vahid Bakechi, from Khorasan Province's Emergency Headquarters, said about 400 people were injured.
Blood supplies were being rushed to the area and Iranian paramilitary Revolutionary Guards closed the immediate area fearing more explosions.
Governor Mojtaba Farahmand-Nekou, the city's top political authority, the head of the Neyshabur fire department and the city's mayor all died, Irna reported, quoting unidentified officials at the Khorasan Province governor-general's office.
According to the BBC, an Irna reporter was also killed in the blast.
In Iran, mayors do not wield political authority, but are in charge of local development issues. The report said the head of the city's energy department was also killed and that the director-general of the provincial railways was missing.
Irna quoted local officials as saying most of the casualties were in five nearby villages that were 'severely damaged'. 'The scale of the devastation is very great, and the damage appears more than initially thought,' said senior official Bakechi.
Iranian television showed footage of overturned, blazing wagons, with fire extending outside the tracks, towards the station and nearby homes. Dozens of people, some wearing face masks to protect themselves from the smoke, were seen walking around or putting out flames on the scene.
Neyshabur has a population of about 170,000, and is at the centre of a farming region for cotton, fruit and grain.
It became one of Persia's foremost cities in AD400. Omar Khayyam, the famous Persian poet, was born in Neyshabur, and is buried there. --
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