A charter bus headed to a casino crashed in the US state of Texas on Saturday, killing eight people and injuring 44 in a one-vehicle rollover, officials said.
Seven people died at the scene on US Highway 83 about 75km north of Laredo and another died later at a Laredo hospital, Texas Department of Public Safety trooper Conrad Hein said.
“The driver of the bus lost control and rolled over. Everything’s real preliminary right now,” he said.
Hein said the driver is among the survivors, adding that his name and the names of passengers were not immediately available.
It was raining on Saturday morning but it was uncertain if that was a factor in the crash that occurred just before 11:30am, Hein said, adding that no other vehicles were in the area at the time.
“Our troopers are going to look into what happened but it’s going to take us some time,” he said of the investigation. “We just know the driver lost control.”
The US National Transportation Safety Board on Saturday night said it was sending a team to also investigate the wreck.
They were expected to arrive yesterday.
Webb County Volunteer Fire Department Chief Ricardo Rangel told the Laredo Morning Times, the bus — belonging to OGA Charters — was headed to a casino in Eagle Pass, about 200km northwest of Laredo.
A message left at the bus company’s headquarters on Saturday was not immediately returned.
Hein said 23 people were taken to Doctors Hospital in Laredo, where the eighth victim died.
Fifteen were taken to Laredo Medical Center. Seven were taken to a Dimmit County hospital in Carrizo Springs.
Laredo Medical Center spokeswoman Priscilla Salinas said that the bus passengers being treated there were in stable condition.
The highway at the accident scene was reopened by early evening.
The crash is one of the deadliest bus accidents in Texas in the past several years. In January last year, two state corrections officers and eight inmates were killed after their Texas Department of Criminal Justice bus struck a piece of displaced highway guardrail west of Odessa. The bus fell about 6m before striking a Union Pacific freight train that was passing beneath the highway.
On Thursday last week, the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded that the wreck was caused by the bus hitting the guardrail piece.
Seventeen passengers died in 2008 near Sherman when their bus plunged over a highway bridge on their way to a religious retreat in Missouri. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed that crash on a retreaded tire on the right front axle that was punctured by an unknown object.
Although the retread itself was not the cause, the panel noted that the tire was affixed to the front axle illegally, the bus company didn’t have the authority to leave Texas after failing an inspection three months earlier, and the company that inspected the bus wasn’t equipped to judge whether it was roadworthy.
The owner of the Houston bus company was charged with making false statements but avoided prison in 2014 after a federal judge sentenced him to three years of probation in a plea agreement.
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