Global & Disaster Medicine

3/2/1944: A train stops in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy, and more than 500 people on board suffocate and die.

HxC

“……either the train was unable to pull the overloaded freight cars up the slope or the train stopped to wait for a train descending in the opposite direction. In any case, the train sat idling in the tunnel for more than 30 minutes. While this might not have posed a severe danger in some circumstances, the train’s locomotives were burning low-grade coal substitutes because high-grade coal was hard to obtain during the war and the coal substitutes produced an excess of odorless and toxic carbon monoxide.

Approximately 520 of the train’s passengers were asphyxiated by the carbon monoxide as they sat in the train…..”


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