Residents describe ‘terrifying’ carnage after crane falls on moving train

Residents of Thailand’s Ban Thanon Khot are accustomed to the noise of trains; Railway is an important means of transportation connecting remote towns to major cities.

But on Wednesday the ordinary rhythm ended in tragedy.

“The noise was abnormally loud. Huge, crashing sound,” said school volunteer Pitchaya Promenade. “I saw a blue crane skidding. It looked like it was stuck for a moment, then suddenly it flipped over.”

At least 32 people died and 66 people were injured when a construction crane collapsed on a moving train. Most were students and workers traveling for school and work.

The BBC captured a horrific scene in the evening where rescue teams were still pulling bodies out of the mangled train. Some of them were completely crushed.

“If I had to visually describe the damage, it looked like a spoon spooning a slice of cake,” said Pitchaya, 32, who had basic first aid training and was able to tend to some of the injured.

“An old woman was hanging upside down [from a carriage]… Another woman, who appeared to have a broken right arm, was holding on to him.”

One of the train carriages caught fire due to the collision, making rescue efforts even more difficult. Emergency response teams used cranes and hydraulic cutting tools to rescue passengers trapped in the debris.

“People were screaming, ‘Help! Help!’ they shouted. and the smoke was starting to rise,” said Penporn Pumjantuek, a restaurant owner who works about 100 m (328 ft) from the scene. “Oil from the train was spilling everywhere.”

He recalls being “caught between fear and courage.”

“I still get scared when I think about it,” he told BBC Thai. “I still remember that moment when I ran to help them when there was no one there yet. They were crying. It was terrible.”

The injured included a one-year-old and an 85-year-old, while seven people were in critical condition, officials said Wednesday.

Local resident Suphann Imchantrik was among those who helped the one-year-old child. “The kid was still breathing, but barely,” the 52-year-old said.

“I also saw the dead… they were lying there. There were injured people. Everything was there. It was a heartbreaking sight.”

The crane involved in the accident was being used to build an overhead railway, part of a US$5.4bn (£4bn) China-backed project to connect Bangkok to south-west China via Laos.

Many questions remain unanswered.

Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul called for an investigation, while the State Railways of Thailand said it would file a lawsuit against the Italian-Thai Development Company, which is responsible for the railway section where the incident occurred.

This is the same company responsible for building the Bangkok skyscraper that collapsed last March during an earthquake that destroyed no other buildings in the city.

Amorn Pimanmas, an engineering professor at Bangkok’s Kasetsart University, believes the cause of Wednesday’s tragedy was human factors, not natural.

Amorn said that given the storm, the flooding and the lack of significant vibration in the train passing underneath, “natural causes can be almost completely ruled out as the source of the event.”

Thailand is no stranger to fatal construction accidents, due in part to poor enforcement of safety standards and regulations.

In 2023, a truck crossing the railway tracks in the east of the country collided with a freight train, killing eight people and injuring four people.

Meanwhile, in the last seven years, nearly 150 people have died in numerous accidents on the road improvement project stretching from Bangkok to the south of the country.

Additional reporting by Kelly Ng in Singapore