WASHINGTON/ORLAND: A delivery truck ploughed into a bus carrying American students in northern California, killing 10 people and injuring at least 30, the California Highway Patrol said.

Massive flames could be seen devouring both vehicles just after the crash, and clouds of smoke billowed into the sky until firefighters had quenched the fire, leaving behind scorched black hulks of metal. Bodies were draped in yellow plastic inside the burned-out bus.

The bus was one of three bringing high school students to tour Humboldt State University on Thursday, which is about a six-hour drive north of San Francisco.

“My understanding is the FedEx truck crossed the highway divide, and it was a head on collision with our bus,” Joyce Lopes, a university official, told AFP. The other two buses arrived safely.

The university said the dead included the drivers of the two vehicles. The identities of the other victims were not immediately released.

“Students were transported to six different hospitals, because it was a fairly remote place ... where the accident occurred,” Lopes explained, adding it was taking time to track down each student.

The university is in Arcata, California, not far from the border with Oregon to the north and the crash happened in Orland, about 125 km to the southeast.

In addition to both drivers, the patrol says three adult chaperones and five teenage students were killed in the crash Thursday. Their identities haven’t been released.

The crash happened a little after 5:30 p.m. Thursday on Interstate 5 near Orland, a small city about 160 km north of Sacramento.

The bus was one of two that the admissions office at Humboldt State University had chartered to bring prospective students from California to tour the Arcata campus, Humboldt’s Vice President of Administrative Affairs Joyce Lopes said.

University police were trying to determine which school districts the students were from and fielding telephone calls from anxious parents, Lopes said.

“Our hearts go out to those who have been affected, and we are here to support them, and their families, in any way possible,” Humboldt State’s President Rollin Richmond said in a statement on the school’s website. Humboldt State spokesman Simon Chabel said the school was working to confirm where in California the students on the wrecked bus are from.