Tempe survivor tells MPs he still sees disaster as ‘bad dream’
Many of the survivors of the February 2023 Tempe railway collision still need psychiatric help so that they sleep at night, a survivor has told the parliamentary inquiry into the disaster.
“Maybe I still haven’t realized what has really happened. I still see it as a bad dream. I just woke up with bruises, burns and an injury to my right knee,” Andreas Alikaniotis, a 22-year-old student at the Macedonian Merchant Navy School, told MPs.
Alikaniotis, who saved 10 or 12 of his fellow passengers after the February 28, 2023, collision, said that many survivors have still not recovered mentally or physically.
“I have met sufferers who have told me that they still need psychiatric help to feel well and sleep at night,” he said.
On the question of whom he considers responsible for the collision, he said it was “certainly not one or two people, nor a simple human error. There are definitely different people involved … Maybe it starts with the individual and it starts with the officials, from the training you need to enter and get a job as a stationmaster or any official position.”
“Being a seaman and an engineer, I can say that, since we treat safety as the be-all and end-all, I really can’t see how there isn’t a double safety mechanism, some system, to detect two trains travelling on the same track.”
MPs commended Alikaniotis for his unselfishness in saving people in the aftermath of the disaster.
