Greece’s worst train disaster with 57 dead when a freight and a passenger train going in opposite directions collided, has been put down to human error with a station master taking responsibility for not switching tracks. Though major demonstrations since of angry citizens say it was an accident waiting to happen and blamed the government. There have been long-running problems with the electronic systems that are supposed to warn them of danger ahead. The transport minister resigned, taking responsibility for the government’s failure to modernise the country’s railways in the three-and-a-half years it had been in power.
The crash is becoming a defining political issue for Greece as it prepares to face a general election in the spring. A senior politician told the BBC that the lack of funding was the direct result of the strict terms of international bailouts imposed after the 2010 debt crisis.
The crash occurred at 11.31 pm close to Thessaloniki on 28 February when both Pluto and Saturn were in the final degree of their respective signs. The chart itself is hard but not especially horrific though, like the 9/11 chart, down in the harmonics a bleaker description emerges – with in this case the destructive 18th harmonic linking a brutal Mars Pluto to Saturn and Neptune.
Often major national disasters precede significant changes at a political or domestic level in the country. The modern Greece 24 July 1974 chart has a Sun at zero degrees Leo sitting in the line of the tr Pluto opposition Sun from later this month which certainly points to a transformational and challenging time over the next two years, setting a different scenario for what follows.
On the country chart there is also a Solar Arc Saturn conjunct Mars on the cusp of the 3rd now which is pretty descriptive of a transport accident.
The recent Solar Eclipse set for this location has Uranus on the IC and Pluto conjunct the Ascendant, marking it out as a fraught region.
Austerity – as imposed by EU diktat – has *real* implications in terms of human life.
Doubtless, if the needed investment money was available, a reliable, modern signalling system would have made this particular crash impossible.
Re austerity: Greece had structural problems before it joined the eurozone and due to defaulting on an IMF loan was forced to put its financial house in order to remain. For example, actually collect tax that was payable and stop appointing people to jobs for which there was no mandate (every medicine graduate was guaranteed a doctor’s salary whether they had work or not, hence every other front door in Athens has/had a doctor’s brass plate on the door). It was a known sinecure and a huge drain on government resources. So yes, people suffered as they had to adjust to a new reality. All counties in the EU are sovereign and free to make their own mistakes. As with most countries it was more about the (mis)management of resources than any externally applied austerity measures which caused a crisis of its own making, one that had been conveniently swept under the carpet for too long. I remember that Dutch tax inspectors were dispatched to Greece to provide instruction and found the ‘students’ to be excellent in the theory of tax collection and entirely woeful in its implementation.
Greece is a great country. I even considered going to live there but decided against it for various reasons, one of which was the tenuous grasp on reality of many of its citizens.
This is just another reality check for that country. Just as Britain is currently getting its own reality check in the form of a political establishment that spends more time posturing and preening itself than serving the public.
Wiki has a time of 11:21 pm. The Guardian had 11:20 pm. Also SA Mercury was exactly conjunct natal Mars in the 3rd and I have noticed those two in cahoots before in transportation accidents. A terrible tragedy.
EAST PALESTINE, OHIO. And more each day.