A Political Train Wreck
A time for mourning and petty politics in Greece
Disaster has struck.
The recent train crash at Tempe, Greece is especially tragic when considering that many of the victims were young students, returning to their universities after spending the Clean Monday long weekend with their families at home.
The stories are too much to bear, even for people who have no children of their own. One family lost 20-year-old twins and their first cousin in the crash. Their fathers had to travel to Larissa, the city closest to Tempe Valley, in order to provide DNA for the identification of the bodies. Temperatures after the crash and the resulting fire reached up to 1,300 degrees Celsius. The three girls were among those burned beyond all recognition.
The death toll at this time is 46.
It’s the single worst train accident in the history of Greece, but the bodies weren’t even pulled out of the wreckage before the political clashes and protests began. We can’t help but think about the Mati wildfire of 2018, where 104 people lost their lives. That tragedy was blamed on the left-wing government of SYRIZA. One of the two massive wildfires of July 2018 in Attica started in Penteli mountain, some 10 km away from Mati, a densely built seaside settlement made primarily of summer homes for residents of Athens. Mati is effectively a dead end leading to the sea. While attempting to keep the main highway to the area clear, police rerouted traffic into Mati. However, when the fire spread across the highway, the only way out of the Mati area was blocked and people there were essentially trapped. Many burned alive in their homes and cars.
Let’s go back to the present. The train crash is attributed to human error, as the station master of Larissa allegedly failed to set the trains on separate tracks. Thus, a passenger train full of students heading north to Thessaloniki and a freight train heading south towards Athens, collided head-on, killing all personnel and many of the passengers, mostly young people. Too young.
Impossibly, the timing makes a tragic event somehow even worse. In view of the upcoming national elections, which might now be postponed, there was no way that this terrible accident wouldn’t immediately turn political. Many are talking about the right-wing New Democracy government’s “Mati” moment, while on social media some are going so far as to claim that the accident was a result of sabotage meant to skew the election result against it.
A lot of things could be said about Twitter and social media in general, but being a place where only empathy and respect shine in a time of national mourning is not one of them.
The problem, of course, goes much deeper than social media trolls. Not at all unlike the Mati wildfire, this accident brings to light the deep-rooted systemic faults that permeate many aspects of life in Greece.
In the case of Mati, the legalization of rampant, unchecked construction that took place mainly in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s everywhere in Greece, but especially around Athens, was what turned that area into a literal deathtrap. The gross miscalculation of the local authorities regarding the possible direction and speed of the wildfire spreading toward Mati was another, but if there was an alternate route of exit from the area the death toll would be limited to the few residents who might refuse to evacuate.
The aforementioned legalization took the form of fines paid to the state. No effort was made, by any government, left, right, or centre to actually fix the problems resulting from unplanned building. People built in forests, on the shore, or on haphazardly cemented gullies. The result is that wildfires and floods often claim homes, sometimes, even people.
In the case of the Tempe train crash, the electronic fail-safes that one would expect to find in a modern railway system are either absent or malfunctioning. In Greece, the usual practice when a disaster like that happens is to blame it on somebody, anybody. “How could anyone be so irresponsible as to take such a serious job so lightly?” someone asked on Twitter.
But is that really the issue?
Human error is unavoidable. In fact, it is a certainty. In a hypothetical, perfectly designed, managed, and maintained system operating in a vacuum, the one unpredictable factor would be human error. Unpredictable as to the time of the error. Entirely predictable as to the certainty of it happening.
Such a perfect system doesn’t even exist, so in the long list of things that can go wrong, human error should be somewhere close to the top.
That is the reason why all efficient systems, whether they are machinery, roads, railways, ships, or computers should be designed to prevent human error as much as possible. Emphasis is placed on “should”.
“Personal responsibility” is a catchphrase that is often used (not just in Greece) to mask wide-ranging systemic issues in literally every aspect of life. If you lost everything and are living on the streets, then it must be your fault alone, rather than that of, say, predatory capitalism, turning everything into a commodity, even people.
To go back to Greece, despite the ongoing push to modernize, some areas lag behind owing to the age-old saying “if it works, don’t fix it”. Yes, it works, right up to the moment that it doesn’t, and then disaster strikes.
Then, suddenly, everyone in my country discovers that the roads are a mess in that area or that safety protocols are ignored over there, or that the person assigned to that critical post was completely useless and was only placed there due to their political affiliation.
In the case of the railways, specifically, the issue becomes even more complicated when considering that the Hellenic Railways Association (OSE) was privatized in 2017. Since then it belongs to Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane, the corresponding OSE of Italy.
And the political game of ping-pong starts.
“The rampant privatization that New Democracy espouses is to blame for this tragedy”. Ping.
“The privatization of OSE happened in 2017, under the SYRIZA government.” Pong.
“The tendering process for the privatization began in 2013, under the joint New Democracy-PASOK government.” Ping.
“Our Minister of Transportation resigned out of respect. What did your government do after Mati?” Pong.
This is the polite version of the online debate currently raging on Greek Twitter and the social media sphere. It will unavoidably be part of the political storm that will grow louder and louder as we get closer to the elections, whenever those might be.
There is one common factor in these two tragedies. They both became major political issues, and if the aftermath of the wildfire at Mati is any indication, politicking built on smouldering corpses will do nothing to solve the true, underlying systemic issues.
If it “works”, don’t fix it.
And when the next disaster strikes, we can always shift the blame to somebody else.
