A traffic accident on the southbound lane of National Sun Yat-sen Freeway (National Freeway No. 1) killed one person and led to a severe congestion on the second day of the 228 Memorial Day holiday, the National Highway Police Bureau said.
The bureau said that the accident occurred at 8:31am on the section between Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu County’s Hukou Township (湖口), when a tour bus belonging to Ho-Hsin Bus Traffic Co rear-ended a small car, leading to serial collisions with another small car and a Kuokuang Bus.
Footage captured on a dashboard camera showed that the Ho-Hsin Bus was cruising on the rightmost lane and did not show any signs of abnormality. However, the bus appeared to fail to reduce its speed when the traffic was slowing down, which caused it to hit the car.
The car was wrecked, and firefighters had to extricate two victims from the vehicle.
The victims were identified as a 43-year-old man, surnamed Chiang (江), and his 19-year-old son. Chiang was taken to hospital in a state of cardiac arrest and was pronounced dead at about noon.
A passenger, surnamed Tsai (蔡), who was in another car hit by the bus, was taken to a local hospital with a laceration on the back of his head and chest pain. A pregnant passenger on the bus, surnamed Hong (洪), was hospitalized after reporting pain in her abdomen.
The accident caused traffic to come to a halt from Hukou to Jhungli (中壢), the National Freeway Bureau said.
Congestion was also reported yesterday morning on the northbound section between Sijhih (汐止) Interchange and Wudu (五堵) on the National Sun Yat-sen Freeway as well as in the southbound sections between Jhunghe (中和) and Dasi (大溪), and between Wurih (烏日) and Wufong (霧峰) on Chiang Wei-shui Memorial Freeway (Freeway No. 3).
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