(The following story by Rachel Donadio and Sofia Groopman appeared on the New York Times website on July 1, 2009.)
ROME — A train carrying liquefied petroleum gas derailed in a quiet seaside Italian neighborhood, engulfing a neighborhood in flames and leaving 17 people dead, including four children, according to revised casualty estimates on Wednesday.
The accident in Viareggio around midnight on Monday left more than 34 people injured, 12 of them in a serious condition. An initial count of the dead put the number at 14 but Italy’s ANSA news agency said Wednesday two small children and an unidentified man subsequently died of severe burns.
The 14-car freight train was traveling south through coastal Tuscany when the axle on the first car broke, Italian officials said. The train ran off the tracks and exploded.
“We saw a ball of fire rising up to the sky,” one witness, Gianfranco Bini, told The Associated Press. The witness lives in a building overlooking the station. “We heard three big rumbles, like bombs. It looked like war had broken out.”
The flames ravaged entire streets, and five buildings collapsed, killing some residents as they slept.
“It was an apocalypse,” a survivor said on Italian television, according to Reuters. “All we could smell was gas and things burning, and all we could see was flames.”
Three children were pulled alive from the rubble, the Italian news media reported.
More than 1,000 people were evacuated, and about 100 were left homeless, the mayor of Viareggio, Luca Lunardini, told news agencies.
Accusations of poor infrastructure and questions about why dangerous materials were being shipped through residential areas immediately added to the political pressures on Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. He was met with boos and cries of “go home” when he arrived in Viareggio on Tuesday afternoon.
At a news conference, Mr. Berlusconi said that the government would soon call a state of emergency, and that it would also “guarantee the reconstruction of 100 percent of the houses destroyed,” ANSA reported.
The accident’s timing was also particularly painful, coming a week before the country is expected to host world leaders for the Group of 8 summit meeting, to be held in another disaster zone: L’Aquila. An earthquake there on April 6 killed nearly 300 people and left 65,000 homeless.
Guido Bertolaso, Italy’s senior civil protection official, called the episode one of the “worst tragedies” to occur in the Italian train system, ANSA reported. In 2005, 17 people died in a collision between a passenger and freight train.
Raffaele Gargiulo, a police spokesman for the nearby city of Lucca, told The A.P. that the bodies of the dead were so badly burned that identifications would be difficult.
The regional spokesman for a railway union told ANSA that Tuesday’s accident was the fifth train-related accident in Tuscany this month. Several other trains either derailed or went off their tracks, though there were no reported fatalities or injuries.
Railway unions called for a one-hour halt in train traffic for Wednesday, Reuters reported, out of respect for the dead and to draw attention to the need for higher safety standards.