分类： society

A routine Thursday commuter and leisure trip between London and the coastal Sussex town of Eastbourne turned into a chaotic incident when a Southern Rail passenger service derailed outside the popular tourist destination of Lewes, southern England, leaving multiple people injured, British Transport Police has confirmed. Three of the train’s carriages overturned in the crash, which left two people with severe injuries and a further nine with minor harm. The train, which departed London’s Victoria Station bound for Eastbourne, was carrying roughly 150 passengers when it left the tracks.

Rob Bradley, one of the passengers on board, was traveling with his 6-year-old daughter when the incident unfolded. He described how the train began to sway violently as it accelerated, before the carriage he and his daughter were occupying suddenly jolted upward, triggering an immediate emergency brake activation. “Everything got thrown forward. My laptop, my AirPods, our bags,” Bradley told the BBC in a post-evacuation interview. “The train kind of skidded for quite a while before it stopped and only then when we turned around did we see that the whole back of the train — literally where we were sat — was open and there was smoke and dust pouring into the carriage.”

After the train came to a halt, Bradley saw that one of the rear carriages had flipped onto its side, sliding down a grassy embankment to rest in an open field below. Though Bradley and his young daughter escaped without physical injury, he witnessed other trapped passengers from the overturned carriages with visible blood on their heads and clothing. He added that a second passenger told him they had sustained lacerations after a train window shattered during the derailment.

Aerial footage captured at the crash site shows emergency responders including firefighters and paramedics treating injured passengers in the adjacent field, with a large response fleet deployed: multiple ground ambulances and three air ambulances were on standby to transport severely injured people to local hospitals. British Transport Police confirmed that all 150 passengers were successfully evacuated from the crash site within approximately three hours of the derailment. As of Thursday, authorities have not confirmed what caused the incident, and a full investigation into the circumstances of the derailment is ongoing.

On Thursday, a powerful explosion triggered by an industrial fire ripped through an ammunition manufacturing facility in Colleferro, a small town located just outside of Rome, Italy. Local authorities confirmed that despite the dramatic scale of the incident, no casualties or injuries have been recorded so far.

The affected site is operated by KNDS Ammo Italy, a defense sector manufacturer that produces military ammunition and a range of other defense-related products. According to initial official briefings, the incident originated in the facility’s powder-pressing production department, where volatile explosive materials are processed.

Witnesses and local residents described hearing a deafening blast that shook buildings across the town. Visual content shared rapidly across social media platforms captured a massive, mushroom-shaped plume of thick smoke billowing high into the sky above the factory, shocking onlookers and sparking widespread public concern.

Emergency services mobilized quickly to contain the blaze: local law enforcement secured the perimeter of the site, while 10 dedicated firefighting crews, supported by a surveillance helicopter, worked to extinguish the flames. The fire spread from the factory grounds to adjacent dry vegetation, complicating initial containment efforts.

Colleferro Mayor Giulio Calamita acknowledged that the incident sparked widespread panic across the community, noting that “there was a huge scare” for local residents. Importantly, he confirmed that all 24 workers who were present inside the facility when the explosion occurred have now been accounted for, and the blast was limited to a single production and storage zone of the plant, preventing wider damage.

Francesco Rocca, president of the Lazio regional government, issued an official statement saying he was monitoring the developing situation with “great concern”. He emphasized that “at this time, the absolute priority is to ensure people’s safety and allow all personnel involved in the emergency response to operate under the best possible conditions.”

As of Thursday evening, the root cause of the explosion remained undetermined. Local law enforcement and public prosecutors have launched an official investigation, with investigators already on site collecting evidence and interviewing witnesses to piece together what led to the incident.

A shark bite incident off Ireland’s southern coast has left a member of a marine research tagging crew with serious injuries, requiring urgent surgery this week. The encounter unfolded Tuesday near Ram Head, Ardmore, County Waterford, when 38-year-old Sebastian Achim pulled a blue shark onto his vessel after hooking it as part of a research catch-and-tag project.

The crew on board the boat were all experienced fishermen carrying out work for Ireland’s Marine Sportfishing Tagging Programme, a long-running initiative that collects ecological data on shark populations around the Irish coast. Achim told Ireland’s national broadcaster RTÉ that after successfully removing the hook from the animal and stepping roughly half a meter back from its tail to maintain a safe buffer zone, he paused to observe the shark before the sudden attack.

“I was just admiring the fish itself, when he just jumped in a millisecond and grabbed into my calf,” Achim recalled in an interview with RTÉ Radio One’s *Morning Ireland*. Refusing to blame the animal for the incident, he noted that the shark was acting on natural survival instincts after being pulled from its open-water habitat. “I cannot say if it was a deliberate attack or it was not a deliberate attack, but the fish is in the right anyway, we took it out of the water,” he said. The crew immediately released the untagged shark back into the ocean to avoid causing it further stress.

In the moments after the bite, Achim acted quickly to stem blood flow by tying a tourniquet above the deep leg wound, while his crew contacted emergency responders. At the time of the incident, the vessel was roughly three hours from the nearest shore, leaving Achim fighting to stay conscious as he waited for rescue. “I lost a lot of blood and kept passing out,” he said. “I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

Multiple emergency agencies launched a coordinated response to the incident, including Ballycotton RNLI, Youghal RNLI, and the Irish Coast Guard’s Rescue 117 helicopter. A rescue winch team extracted Achim from the boat and airlifted him to Cork University Hospital for urgent care.

Once he arrived at the hospital, the adrenaline from the incident faded, and Achim began to experience constant severe pain. Medical teams informed him that the bite had torn away significant amounts of tissue and skin, requiring reconstructive surgery with skin grafts to repair the wound. Despite the gravity of his injury, Achim said his primary concern during the rescue was avoiding panic among his crew and reassuring his partner, rather than his own condition. “I was trying to keep myself awake so I didn’t make anyone panic,” he said. “It doesn’t matter the gravity of the problem, it matters for me that the people around do not suffer because of my actions.”

Blue sharks, the species involved in the incident, are common seasonal visitors to Irish and British coastal waters, arriving between June and October each year to feed. These long-distance migratory sharks can grow to more than three meters in length, preying on open-water fish, squid, smaller sharks, and seabirds. They are also one of the most targeted species for recreational catch-and-release angling in Ireland, and are considered a valuable marine sport fish.

Jack Kelly, a Galway-based marine biologist and underwater cinematographer, explained that blue sharks’ famous curiosity often leads them to interact with humans and human objects. Unlike many animals, sharks do not have limbs to investigate unfamiliar items, so they often use bumping or close approaches to explore new objects in their environment. “If a shark approaches anything, really, it’s not like they have fingers to be able to investigate to see what it is,” Kelly told BBC Radio Ulster’s *Good Morning Ulster*. “For me, when I’m underwater they might give the camera a bump just to see what it is, so their curiosity for me is definitely something that stands out.”

Ecological data from Inland Fisheries Ireland shows that blue sharks are classified as Near Threatened on both the IUCN Red List and Ireland’s national Red List for cartilaginous fish. The Marine Sportfishing Tagging Programme, which has operated off Ireland’s coast since 1970, has tagged more than 19,300 blue sharks as of 2013, accounting for 45% of all fish tagged through the initiative.

This week’s incident is not the first recorded shark bite off the Irish coast. In 2018, a recreational angler from Belfast suffered serious lower arm injuries after a blue shark bit him while he was pulling the animal onto his boat off Cork, requiring a rescue from Crosshaven RNLI.