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Runaway Train
 The nation's worst-ever rail disaster sparked a firestorm
of controversy. But ranking MPs and independent consumer advocates
say real change is in the offing -- and suggest that the debate over
reforms shows just how far Egypt's political and economic discourse
has matured.
It must have been terrifying. At the back of Train 832,
passengers aboard the third-class cars awoke around 1 a.m. on 20
February to realize that there was a fire spreading toward them. In
a railway car stuffed with almost three times as many people as
seats, it would have been difficult to move even in a calm
moment.
As riders panicked, the lights went out. Passengers trying to
reach the next car struggled with a door piled high with bags
because the overhead luggage racks were occupied by other riders.
People trying to jump from the windows found them crossed by bars.
And if anyone had the presence of mind to reach into the fire
extinguisher compartments, they would have found them empty.
As the sun rose on the charred cars in Ayyat later that
morning, the nation was grieving the worst train disaster in its
history, and public outrage was building. The resignation of two top
officials could not prevent calls for the government to step down,
though they have slackened of late.
Investigations are ongoing to identify lower-ranking
individuals who may share responsibility for the disaster. More
broadly, the outrage over Train 832 has forced the Ebeid government
to admit that the state-owned railway has failed to provide basic
safety standards for those riders who can't afford more than a
third-class ticket.
The tragedy has also reordered the national agenda. Prime
Minister Atef Ebeid and his government have acknowledged the need to
prioritize improving conditions on passenger rail lines, and Cabinet
leaders assured the People's Assembly in March that they would do
whatever it takes to rehabilitate the Egyptian National
Railway.
The problem is, they don't have what it takes in terms of
ready money. Cabinet leaders told Parliament they have a
wide-ranging development plan to increase capacity and refurbish old
rail cars, but it will take three years to implement. And while
stepped-up policing appears to have had some effect in keeping fire
hazards off the trains, one month after the Ayyat disaster,
third-class cars were still leaving Cairo's Ramses Station with
human beings on the luggage racks, bars on the windows, and nothing
in the fire-extinguisher boxes.
Blame to spare
The record toll was 364 dead, down from initial estimate of
373, with another 64 passengers injured. Casualties were high
because the train from Cairo to Luxor was crammed with people
heading to Upper Egypt to celebrate the Eid Al-Adha holiday
with their families. The staggering loss drew international
sympathy, an outpouring of donations for the victims' families from
across Egyptian society, and a demand for accountability that could
not be ignored.
The first to fall were political figureheads: Two days after
the disaster, Minister of Transportation Ibrahim El-Demeiri and
Railway Authority chief Ahmed El-Sherif handed in their
resignations. Then prosecutors and members of the People's Assembly
turned their scopes on railway workers. Investigators, headed by
Prosecutor General Maher Abdel Wahid, have promised to put on trial
any railway employee suspected of negligence in the case.
The public's mind is ranging further. Local newspapers batted
around the suspicion that an uncontrolled short-circuit in the
train's wiring sparked the fire. Third-class passengers interviewed
by Business Today Egypt in late March even entertained the
theory that the blaze might have been caused by a bomb.
But in the judgment of the technical committee that examined
the wreck for the prosecutor general, the source of the fire was the
mundane object suspected from the beginning: a portable propane
stove brought aboard for making tea. The technical group's report to
Wahid has not been made public, but committee member Prof. Boulos
Naguib Salama discussed its conclusions in an interview with
bt.
While the circumstances that made the train burn out of
control were highly uncommon for Egyptian trains, the factors that
made the event so deadly are present on every third-class rail car,
Salama says: too many people, too few emergency provisions. The
plans before Parliament contain no quick fixes for either of those
conditions.
The locomotive on Train 832 pulled 16 cars: two for mail,
five for second-class passengers and nine for third-class. Each
third-class car had 104 to 108 seats, but 200 to 300 occupants. (By
contrast, first-class cars have just 50 seats, with 75 seats in
second-class cars; no standing is allowed in either first or second
class.) The total number of fire extinguishers on the 16-car train:
two, both on them in second-class cars.
It was in the rear of third-class car number 11 that police
found the destroyed cooker and where the technical committee found
scorch marks they concluded showed the origin of the blaze. As the
train proceeded at 80-90 km per hour after the fire broke out, the
wind carried the flames toward the rear. Wires for the lighting
burned out quickly, and the emergency brake would have been
difficult to find in the dark.
"You can imagine -- suddenly, a fire -- how the people would
react," Salama says. "The people are scared and crying, 'Fire,
fire!' Most of the people have been sleeping. Darkness is
everywhere."
Salama, a professor of engineering at Cairo University, has
extensively studied Egypt's railways and accidents. He was one of
seven on the technical committee, which also included experts in
fire suppression, crime scene investigation, electrical systems and
materials.
Salama says the technical group dismissed speculation about
an electrical fault: All the circuit breakers were functional, and
the panel found no telltale scorch marks near the power tube that
runs beneath the carriages. While some witnesses reported seeing a
spark between the two rearmost cars, a fire started there could not
have traveled against the wind, experts say.
The train passed a kiosk, where a worker saw the fire and,
unable to directly contact the train, relayed a message through the
central station in Cairo. The driver halted the train near Kafr
Ammar village in Ayyat. About 10 minutes had passed since the fire
started, the technical group estimates. The driver's assistant ran
outside the train and uncoupled car 10 from the front cars, which
the driver then moved away from the burning third-class carriages.
The fire's victims were concentrated in cars 11 and 12; once the
train was stopped, most of the rearmost passengers were able to flee
before the fire consumed their cars.
On 24 February, the government buried 137 unidentified
victims in paupers' graves in Cairo. Basic compensation from the
government has been supplemented by an outpouring of generosity in
private donation drives.
Critical mass
The public uproar heightened as the Ayyat investigations
began to bring to light the full extent of Egypt's train dangers. A
fact-finding committee in Parliament has learned that train
accidents with a comparatively small number of fatalities have been
numerous -- adding up to some 5000 deaths since 1995, according to
Kamel Ahmed, a rabble-rousing independent MP from Alexandria.
"Most of the information [received by the fact-finding
committee] was compiled from within the railway system. Most of the
crashes were not made public or were considered minor, so no one
paid attention to them in the local press," Ahmed says. "But after
this crash, the entire investigation has been forwarded to
Parliament's fact-finding committee."
One example from the case file: A woman entered a bathroom
that had no floor. "She fell under the train," Ahmed says. "That
train continued to run for a year."
The outspoken Ahmed is one of many who are accusing the
railway system of bad management bordering on negligence. But the
root problem is a lack of money. Allowing problems in public
services to fester long after they are widely known "is the behavior
of developing countries," Cairo University's Salama says. Two years
ago, then-Transport Minister El-Demeiri discussed a development plan
that would modernize the railway. It included a proposal to
refurbish 800 third-class carriages at a cost of LE 860 million, but
Cabinet felt it could not afford the expense, local press reports
claim.
But Ayyat has given reforms a new urgency, and the Ebeid
government gives every appearance of trying to tackle the problem.
The new transport minister, Hamdi Abdel-Salam El-Shayeb, declined to
discuss with bt the possible cost of the necessary
upgrades or how the government will fund them. A ministry official
who spoke on condition that he not be named said the initial focus
is on increased enforcement. A senior aide to El-Shayeb backed up
that assertion, saying the minister will make a practical reform
plan a priority now that he has been sworn into office. "Official"
reform plans touted in the local press, the aide added, have not
been endorsed by the minister.
Anticipating reform
But Hamdi El-Tahan, who is leading Parliament's investigation
as chairman of the PA's transportation committee, is optimistic that
reforms will not be long in coming.
El-Tahan, a member of the ruling National Democratic Party
from Beheira, told bt he is confident that the
government will find the money to upgrade the railways and add
carriages to reduce congestion on third-class cars, which carry the
vast majority of total travelers. But many of the improvements will
take up to three years to fund and implement, he adds.
"There were development plans that were already started. We
are asking for those studies to be presented to us. But the
government expressed its willingness to do whatever is necessary for
the development, regardless of the final numbers," El-Tahan
explains. "The reforms will take time, over the course of three
years. But the government is ready to make that [money] available
over that time. This has already started, by developing the cars and
employing the available capabilities and resources."
While the local press reported the government had pledged to
spend immediately some LE 250 million on urgent service upgrades,
El-Tahan says the actual figure will be significantly higher. Over
the next five months, the Railway Authority will be introducing more
modern third-class cars with fire-resistant plastic -- and slightly
higher fares. Each month, El-Tahan says, will see 10 new cars added
and safety features on 20 existing cars upgraded.
MP Kamel Ahmed adds that the Railway Authority is also
replacing some of the worst trains on the routes to Upper Egypt with
trains from the Alexandria line as a quick fix. Still, he is
skeptical of the government's reassurances. "They can't afford to
fix them all even if they wanted to. They wouldn't even know where
to start. There are minimal steps they can take to seem like they
are doing something to bring about change," Ahmed claims.
But El-Tahan and other leaders are adamant that basic safety
equipment will come sooner rather than later. El-Tahan said in late
March that there would soon be a fire extinguisher on every car,
while the bars (installed to prevent riders from jumping aboard
through the window) should already have been removed.
But the parliamentarian may have been overly optimistic on
those points, as a walk through third-class trains leaving Ramses
Station on the afternoon of 21 March revealed. While the train to
Mansoura had extinguishers in all cars and no bars on the windows,
two trains to Rofeya and Minouf had bars on nearly every window and
just one extinguisher between them. The Alexandria train departed
with the familiar spectacle: riders standing in the legroom area
between seats, queues jamming into the doors even as the train
pulled away, and a handful of passengers running alongside and
vaulting into the mass of people in the doorways.
In the grimmest policy reaction to Ayyat, the government has
now ordered automatic life insurance policies for all rail
passengers paid for through a 5-piaster increase in ticket prices.
(For more on the insurance policies, see News Focus, page
32.)
Stepped-up enforcement
While the equipment may be lagging behind, the increased
security presence is clear at Ramses Station. The government
announced it would increase patrols on platforms and inspections of
baggage to enforce the ban on cigarette smoking and portable stoves.
Marwa Ali, an 18-year-old Cairo University student heading home to
Minouf on a third-class car, says police have been effective on
those counts.
In the past, each first-class car had a worker to attend to
fires and mishaps. Now, laborers have been reassigned so that every
car will have a monitor, El-Tahan says. He notes that railway
workers now walk through the cars to stop riders from using any
cookers they may have managed to smuggle on board. The
transportation chairman also says his committee will make its own
unannounced spot checks, perhaps traveling incognito in
gallabeyas.
Other personnel changes may not be apparent to the public.
While prosecutors hunt for possible worker negligence in the Ayyat
blaze, the government and the People's Assembly say they are coming
down hard on lax management practices. While promising tougher
performance reviews, Cabinet has empowered conductors and railway
station chiefs to penalize railway workers they deem negligent. And
El-Tahan says that of the "hidden problems" of the railways that
were revealed by Ayyat, the biggest were the lack of training for
railway personnel and the inability of managers to correct
them.
El-Tahan says one top goal is "liberating management from
administrative obstacles ... Reform plans include raising the
inspectors' performance through training, through supervising and
monitoring them and selecting good management. I don't want to say
'new management,' but capable management."
Independent MP Ahmed was more blunt in describing a failure
of middle management. "The railway problems have been adding up for
the past 15 years. No one ever bothered to investigate the
grievances," Ahmed claims. "These complaints were from the citizens,
but also from those working on the trains -- the drivers, the
maintenance staff and the technicians. These complaints ranged from
negligence to lack of maintenance to poor safety standards. This was
brought to the attention of the government more than 15 years ago;
nothing has ever been done."
Finally, at the top, the Transport Ministry can now devote
more attention to ground transport after its civil aviation
functions were spun off into their own ministry in a mid-March
cabinet shuffle.
Human error
There is one other group of culprits: The riders.
Editorialists complained that government officials were blaming the
victims when they pointed to the portable stove. But Cairo
University's Salama says speaking out about the danger of riders'
own behavior is appropriate even if it is unpopular in a country
still mourning the deaths.
"Maybe it is very hard for the families of the people who
died in this accident, but there is a big role in preventing such
habits as taking such very dangerous materials in mass transit. They
must feel deeply that they may pay with their lives as the price for
such habits," Salama says. "The press and the TV can play a big role
by teaching the people and showing them what is going to happen when
they do this."
Yet even in the issue of tea, there is a class inequity on
Egyptian rails: First-class cars are connected to the train's
generator car for air conditioning and heating, so tea stations can
be powered safely by electricity. Third-class cars are not (trains
without first-class cars, like Train 832, usually don't even have a
generator car), so even tea vendors must use dangerous kerosene or
gas.
Any takers?
With the government already running a budget deficit, the
Ayyat disaster has revived the inevitable suggestion that the
railway turn to the private sector.
Hassan Gemei is vice president of the Egyptian Federation for
Consumer Protection Associations, a coalition of 60 groups. He says
the government seems to be doing the best it can within its
financial constraints, but needs to consider new ideas. Perhaps the
planned high-speed train from Alexandria to Aswan will generate
excess revenue that can be diverted to third-class upgrades, he
suggests. "We can see that there is an improvement in some public
services with the policy of privatization. Why are the railways
still out of privatization, if their limited budget is one of the
major reasons for the insufficiency of the service?" Gemei
asks.
But privatization seems like wishful thinking. The railways
are a cash sinkhole, operating with an financial shortfall that
Al-Ahram Weekly in 2000 estimated at LE 400 million a year --
and carrying a debt that Ebeid himself puts at LE 17 billion. Add to
that a bloated workforce and steep, overdue capital upgrade needs,
and the national railways are not exactly a hot investment prospect.
"Who can pay such an amount of money to buy a loser?" wonders Cairo
University's Salama.
Private owners would demand higher revenues, but the
government keeps fares low because lower-income citizens demand
cheap transportation. Former Transport Minister El-Demeiri, who fell
on his sword after the Ayyat blaze, told Al-Ahram Weekly in
February 2000 that he was looking at the possibility of inviting
private investors to operate catering services at stations,
earmarking the gains to improve services for third-class travelers.
But he studiously avoided the term "privatization," with its
connotation of layoffs, and he said even partial private involvement
would not lead to higher ticket prices.
More likely than bringing in private ownership is the
introduction of private-sector thinking. Transport committee
chairman El-Tahan says he is developing a proposal to divide the
railways into revenue centers, with each sector of the operation
"charging" the others for its services. That would make managers
more conscious of squeezing expenses and preserving revenues,
El-Tahan says.
While the tragedy of Train 832 has been heartbreaking for
Egyptian society, there is a positive side to the reaction, in the
opinion of consumer advocate Gemei. The virulence of the public
criticism directed toward high-ranking officials by members of
Parliament and citizens -- and the government's haste to mollify the
critics -- shows how far the state of public discourse has
progressed since the days of Gamal abd El-Nasser.
"More than 20 years ago, this [sort of tragedy] could occur
without the people in the country even being notified. We could have
had worse than this, and we would not have had the possibility of
dealing with it," Gemei says. "It's a good indication that you can
ask the government to deal with such problems, that you can have
people in a civil society that can express their hopes and will."
bt
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