SZCZEKOCINY, Poland — One American is among the victims in a head-on train crash in southern Poland, according to a new report.
NBC News reports that the US Consulate in Krakow notified the victim’s family, but that person’s identity has not been released.
Rescue workers toiled through the night to pull survivors from the crash, which left 60 injured.
“We know that 15 people are dead. Unfortunately we have not yet been able to remove the body of the last victim. We can see it but not get to it,” Pawel Fratczak, a spokesman for the emergency services, said.
“This is the worst catastrophe in years,” Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk told reporters when he arrived on the scene late Saturday.
Sixty people were hospitalized with about half reported to be in serious condition, rescuers said.
Ukrainian nationals were reported to be among the injured, while French and Spanish citizens were also on the trains but apparently not injured in the crash.
Some 350 passengers were on board the two trains which collided head-on at 9:00pm local time Saturday, Poland’s PKP railways said.
One train was en route to the southern city of Krakow from the capital Warsaw, while the other was bound for the capital from the southeastern city of Przemysl.
Investigators gave no early indications as to what caused the crash, which happened on a stretch of the line which had recently been modernized, according to Transport Minister Slawomir Nowak.
“We heard a deafening noise and we were hurled out of our seats,” an unnamed survivor told the PAP Polish news agency. “We saw crushed bodies pinned beneath seats and we saw parts of bodies inside and outside the train wagons.”
Some 450 firefighters and 100 policemen were involved in the rescue operation, officials said.
Saturday’s accident was the worst rail catastrophe in Poland since 1990, when 16 people were killed in a collision between two trains in the Warsaw suburb of Ursus.
The country’s worst train accident was in 1980 in Otoczyn, near the northern city of Torun, when 67 people died and 62 were injured in a collision between a passenger and a freight train.