HONG KONG, 11 July 2003 — A double-decker bus carrying children and commuters collided with a truck and plunged off a Hong Kong expressway bridge yesterday, killing 21 people in the territory’s worst traffic accident in recent memory. The bus driver was among the dead. Twenty passengers were injured, one of them a nine-year-old girl.
Assistant Commissioner of Police Bonnie Smith Yee-lo told a news conference that the truck driver had been arrested and would be charged with dangerous driving. After the collision, which took place shortly after dawn, the bus crashed through a bridge safety barricade on the busy Tuen Mun Road in the New Territories and tumbled 50 meters down a cliff.
Police said the crash, which sent the bus plunging about 50 meters before landing on its side, was one of the worst on the city’s relatively safe highways in at least a decade. “It is the worst traffic accident in Hong Kong... for more than 10 years,” a police spokeswoman said. Firefighters at the scene said 19 people died instantly as the bus left the hilly stretch of highway before smashing down onto rocks near a small village. Two others died in hospital.
The cause of the crash was not immediately known but witnesses said the bus collided with a cargo truck. Police said skid marks at the crash site indicated a collision. Police regional commander of the New Territory south, Bonnie Smith, said later that charges may be laid against the truck driver.
“So far our evidence available suggests we have sufficient evidence to arrest and charge somebody for dangerous driving and causing death. This person is the container truck driver,” she said. The bus company’s managing director John Chan told reporters that the bus driver, on his first trip of the day, had died from his injuries.
He said the bus was new and had been inspected a couple of days earlier.
Injured passengers, many still unconscious, were seen being carried away on stretchers after rescuers formed a human chain to free them from the wreckage. A temporary mortuary was set up near the site of the accident to identify the victims. The wreckage of the bus, its front end crushed by the impact, was later lifted by a crane onto the elevated highway above.
The impact left part of the bus embedded in the earth and rescuers had to saw their way through the mangled wreckage before they could pull bodies out.
