Train Disaster in Montenegro
On Monday, January 23 a train traveling from Bijelo Polje to Bar in Montenegro went off the tracks due to a brake failure and plunged into a 330 ft. ravine. As soon as I knew about the disaster, on Tuesday, I wrote to friends in Montenegro. Janko Andrijesevic gave a full account of the disaster in his response to me. There's been a terrible train derailment 10 km north of Podgorica. The driver lost control of the brakes, so the wagons slipped down a precipice. . . . 44 people have been reported dead so far, while 185 have been injured. many kids were on the train, they went skiing to a northern ski resort. five children are dead, about 30 seriously injured. Janko also wrote that an aggravating factor is the weather. The Siberian cold has struck us yesterday, so it is freezingly cold and windy.
I also heard from a former student, Aleksander Bogdanovic, who wrote more compactly: The tragedy took away 44 humen lives which is not the final score of death's cruel embrace. We have 3-days commiseration in here. His words make clear how heavily this tragedy has been felt.
A longer reflection on the impact of the disaster came from my colleague Zorica Ciric. I excerpt her note to me more or less unedited, because the intensity of her feelings comes across best, I think, in her breathless writing. [This is e-mail, remember, so inevitably very informal. Still, I think it is a powerful piece.]
it’s really a big tragedy for a small country as ours. ... u know how it goes with the bad news-they lie so that people wouldn’t panic 2 much. what can i tell... that’s life!!! but towns from the whole montenegro are helping, and also serbia and croatia offered help, so i hope the doctors and all other dealing with the accident will give their best in any way. the worst thing is that about half of the people from the train were children up to 16 years old.
... it seems to me that we went really 2 far in destroying nature and in being generally cruel to each other, so... it’s like we’re just reaping what we’ve sown, and we sowed manyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy bad things in this world. The atmosphere about the whole world is like it’s gonna be the end of the world soon:) cos almost every day u hear a bad news.
i suppose the comment sounds cruel in the context of the accident we’re talking about, but my opinion is that if we don’t think about the ESSENCE of the things the world can’t be better.