At least two Canadians injured in double-decker Megabus crash, four dead
Posted September 11, 2010 9:48 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
“I fell over, was thrown over people, and then it was all quiet,” said Vicky Reed, 71, from Dundas, Ont. “The top of the bus had been pushed back just like an accordion.”
The Toronto-bound Megabus, which was not on its regular route, failed to clear a railway bridge, crashed, and flipped on its side around 2:30 a.m. The accident occurred on the Onondaga Lake Parkway in a Syracuse suburb, some 400 kilometres southeast of Toronto.
A Foreign Affairs spokesperson in Ottawa confirmed late Saturday that none of the Canadians on board the bus were killed or seriously injured. At least seven Canadians, all from Ontario, were among the 28 passengers on board the bus.
Don Carmichael, senior vice-president for Coach USA, which operates Megabus, said the details of the incident were still “sketchy.” He didn’t know why the bus had left its prescribed route when it crashed.
“It is not an alternative route prescribed, that’s going to be part of our investigation,” he said. “We really have no idea why it was on that route.”
Carmichael said the bus driver had driven the route “a number of times” and would have known the proper routing to come off Interstate 81 for a scheduled stop at the Regional Transportation Centre in Syracuse.
The bus driver was among five people who remained in hospital Saturday.
Many of the passengers aboard were rushed to various area hospitals with injuries that reportedly ranged from minor to serious.
Onondaga County Sheriff Kevin Walsh said the fatalities included three men and a woman in her teens or early 20s. He said two of the dead were not from the U.S. and one was from Kansas. Walsh also said there was no indication the driver had been drinking or using drugs.
Reed said the four passengers who were killed were seated at the top of the bus, near the front, right where the vehicle would have crashed into the low-hanging bridge.
“The bus was too tall and so it sort of ripped the top of the front part of the bus off,” said Reed. “The bus was then sort of on its side.”
Reed, who suffered a knee injury from the crash, recalls seeing one woman whose face was covered in blood and another with a leg trapped under a piece of metal who was moaning in pain.
Meanwhile, the driver, who has been doing the job since Dec. 2009, emerged from a cloud of concrete dust, injured, but alive.
“His face looked like it had been cut with razor blades, he couldn’t understand what happened, he was … in shock,” said Reed.
Lee Veeraraghavan, 27, a Ph.D student at the University of Pennsylvania on her way home to Toronto, said she was in the back of the bus on the lower level when she woke to a bang. She was thrown to the other side of the aisle and ended up with a woman on top of her.
“I just remember coming to in pain and a lot of broken glass under the bus, and there was a woman’s legs on top of me,” she told the Syracuse Post-Standard.
“People were calling for help and moaning,” she said.
Beneath the bus there appeared to be a severed leg, said Veeraraghavan. She said she tried not to look at it again.
Someone managed to pry open what appeared to be a door and the passengers got out. As Veeraraghavan exited the wreckage, she said she saw an unconscious man hanging upside-down from the upper level. A paramedic later told passengers the man had died, she said.
Richard Blansett with the Red Cross of central New York said his organization provided support to rescuers as well as those who survived the crash.
At least 14 passengers were put up at a Syracuse hotel where the Red Cross was provided them with meals and emotional support.
Blansett said he had personally spoken to four Canadians who were on board the bus, while they were recuperating at the hotel.
Red Cross workers met with passengers to help them cope with the emotional toll of the crash, Blansett said.
“They’re folks who’ve been through a very, very arduous experience,” he said. “They’re in a very fragile state and we’re trying to do everything we can to provide emotional support and the physical support they need.”
The bus left Philadelphia on Friday night. It was scheduled to stop in Syracuse and Buffalo on its way to Toronto.
Photographs showed the top level of the bus crushed and partially peeled back in the front. The double-decker struck the bridge span between two large signs warning that the clearance was 10 feet, 9 inches.
Carmichael said the fatal crash is the first such incident for Megabus since its launch in 2006.
“We have extremely high standards of safety and we’ve transported in excess of seven-million people and never an incident like this, ” he said.
The bus line said it would co-operate fully with authorities to figure out how the crash occurred. The company also said it would transport the passengers who have been released from hospital to their final destinations.
A spokesman for the New York State Department of Transportation said the railway bridge where the accident occurred had been the site of previous mishaps.
“Over the years there have been several incidences where tractor trailers have become wedged under the bridge and had to be backed out,” Gene Cilento said, noting there had previously been “no fatalities associated with it.”
Cilento called Saturday’s accident “extremely serious.”
He said local and state police will investigate the accident and the department of transportation will look into any safety recommendations as a result.
(With files from Mary Gazze and Dominque Jarry-Shore)
