The dark truth

On February 28, 2023, Greeks were shocked. Fifty-seven people, mostly young adults, perished in the crumpled and burnt sheet metal of a high-speed train collision.

Everyone was quick to express their abhorrence. The then leader of the main opposition, Alexis Tsipras, said he was “shocked by the unspeakable tragedy in Tempe. What happened is unthinkable. Our thoughts [are with] the people who have died so unjustly” (1/3/2023). The Athens Metro Operation Workers Union said it “mourns together with the whole of society for the tragic fatal accident on the Greek railways. Dozens of our fellow human beings were lost and as many were injured at the altar of private profit and the indifference of those in charge” (2/3/2023). The union’s mourning about Tempe was so intense that it held a strike in Athens, disrupting the commute of 4 million people. Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis went to the scene of the accident to say: “I met with relatives of the victims and the missing at Larissa hospital. In their unspeakable pain, with great dignity, they asked me, ‘Why?’ And they told me, ‘Never again.’ We owe them an honest answer” (5/2/2023).

On the anniversary of the Athens Polytechnic student uprising, we learned that “the black box of the intercity that collided head-on with a freight train in Tempe has been located. According to information, the black box was found in the wreckage of the wagons kept at the OSE depot and was handed over to the investigative authorities,” Kathimerini wrote on November 17. In other words, a crucial element for the ongoing investigation was found – rather by chance – nine months after the crash.

There are experts who say that the nature of the accident, namely the head-on collision of trains, makes the data recorded in the black box irrelevant to the ongoing investigation. That may be the case, but in any investigation, you first have to collect all the available data and then you proceed to evaluate them. When simple criminal cases are made or overturned by a sliver of evidence, shouldn’t it be a priority to find the box that goes into trains just for such cases – that is, in case of an accident?

I wrote a while ago that, in this country, “we are so shocked that no one has the time to do their job properly. If we changed a little every time we were shocked, we certainly wouldn’t have reached this point.” Thus, even more shocking than the “shock” of February’s train collision is the indifference to the news of the discovery in November – that is, that it took the authorities nine months to find what is normally the first thing to look for in every accident.

Here’s a question: If it took 38 weeks to find the black box, how long would it take to find the dark truth?