An early morning wreck in Union County, Pennsylvania, has left one person dead and 44 people with personal injuries. Authorities say that a Greyhound bus traveling through Pennsylvania slammed into the rear of a tractor trailer on Interstate 80 at 1:41 Wednesday morning. Accident investigators have not determined what may have led to the rear-end accident.
The driver of the tractor trailer says that he was driving at about the speed limit when the bus slammed into the rear of the rig. The bus driver reportedly is a 12 year veteran with the bus company. Authorities say that 49 passengers were traveling on the bus--the vast majority of the passengers were victims of the bus accident.
Dozens of ambulances were dispatched to the area to attend to the accident victims who suffered injury. One woman was killed and as many as 44 people suffered some level of injury. Accident victims were transported to hospitals in at least five different Pennsylvania communities. The extent and nature of the injuries suffered by the survivors of the crash are not clear from an early media report.
Several passengers apparently escaped serious injury, as relief buses were dispatched to provide transport for the uninjured. Other accident victims were treated and released from hospitals Wednesday, and the relief buses reportedly picked up those accident victims from the hospital.
An investigation into the interstate accident remains open.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration says that roughly 11,000 bus accidents involving injury occur each year in the United States. Based upon the agency’s statistics, the number of injury accidents declined between 1988 and 2008, but thousands of injury accidents continue to occur involving buses.
Passengers can suffer injury in these kinds of mass-transportation accidents, as well as people who are not passengers, but other motorists or even people at a bus stop. In traffic however, buses can be large targets and many bus accidents may involve the same kinds of analysis as any other type of motor vehicle crash in determining who may be at fault in a wreck. Identifying any negligent actors is an important aspect of conducting an accident investigation.