The death toll is approaching 80, scores more were wounded and the eyewitness accounts are sobering in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, after Wednesday's crash of a high-speed passenger train.
Reuters writes that "in what one local official described as a scene from hell, bodies covered in blankets lay next to the overturned carriages as smoke billowed from the wreckage after the disaster. ... Cranes were still pulling out mangled debris on Thursday morning, 12 hours after the crash."
"The scene is shocking, it's Dante-esque," the head of the Galicia region, Alberto Nez Feijo, said in a radio interview, according to The Guardian.
A man who went to help, 47-year-old baker Ricardo Martinez, tells the wire service that:
"We heard a massive noise and we went down the tracks. I helped getting a few injured and bodies out of the train. I went into one of the cars but I'd rather not tell you what I saw there."