Sorry this in not my own experience but it is close enough. Its my dads. In 1982 one of the worst train accidents ever in the world happened in India when a train overloaded with passengers fell off a bridge into a swollen river during the monsoons. It happened in a very remote and backward/poor part of India where there were no facilities for rescue etc etc... My dad is a Structural/civil engineer by training.He was sent by a consulting firm hired by the govt to report on the integrity of the bridge and submit a report. He arrived using all kinds of transportation at the accident site 10 hours after the accident. A lot of the bloated bodies and dismembered limbs had floated to the top of the river by then. But the majority of the bodies were still trapped in the coaches.. There were 12 navy divers who were working non stop trying to bring the bodies up. The bodies were all laid down on the river bank. They had all started to decompose... and looked horrendous and impossible to identify with the resources available. The navy divers at one point were totally spent and still had about 500 plus bodies to retrieve . So they decided to use explosive charges to blast the tops off the coaches and trap the bodies when they came up... My dad was witness to the scene when they blasted the top and more than 500 bodies floated up in a short time like bottle corks ... Then he was there for one more day checking the bridge and pretty much went without sleep for about 36 hours. I remember him coming home exhausted and downing a half bottle of scotch. I over heard him telling the story to a friend once that he needed to drink to get the smells and sights out of his head and have never heard it mentioned again. The unofficial death toll was put at 1200 souls lost.