Xinhua General News Service
Copyright 2006 Xinhua News Agency
Rome’s emergency services, which have been preparing for a terrorist emergency for years, were praised on Tuesday for their handling of the city’s worst ever underground train crash.
“The emergency services worked well,"Piero Marrazzo, president of Rome province, was quoted by local media as saying, after he had visited the injured in a hospital.
Two trains collided at about 09:45 a.m. (0845 GMT) at the Piazza Vittorio subway station. The accident killed one person and injured about 150.
Within 90 minutes, the injured people, some of them in extremely serious condition, were extracted from the wrecked trains and rushed to hospitals.
By 01:00 p.m. (1200 GMT), the station had returned to operation.
“We’ve been working to be able to deal with this sort of emergency for a year. We are now able to respond well, but where security is concerned you can never do enough,” said Marrazzo.
Since 2001, security and emergency services have been making contingency plans for terror attacks, including a scenario where a bomb hits a subway station.
As for the collision, the authorities have ruled out the possibility of a terrorist attack.
About 150 firefighters were on the spot at Piazza Vittorio within minutes as fire services in city suburbs dispatched 26 teams to the scene of the disaster.
The teams which abandoned their stations in the suburbs were then replaced by additional staff brought in from areas outside the city.
The Red Cross sent in 10 ambulances and 80 people including doctors, nurses and volunteers.
The police quickly set up its headquarters in a department store nearby, temporarily suspending commercial activity.