The Taiwan Transportation Safety Board yesterday said that a report would be published in January on the data collected from a March 16 tour bus crash on the Suhua Highway, now that the Yilan District Prosecutors’ Office has released the wreckage.
The tour bus, registered to Teng Lung Transport, was returning with 45 passengers from a trip to Hualien when it crashed into a mountainside along the highway, killing six people and injuring 39.
Board chairman Young Hong-tsu (楊宏智) made the remarks on the sidelines of a meeting of the legislature’s Transportation Committee when asked about the board’s progress in investigating the incident.
Photo: Chen Hsin-yu, Taipei Times
The board did not start examining the tour bus wreckage until recently, when Yilan prosecutors turned it over to board investigators, he said.
“We had been unable to quickly inspect the tour bus wreckage because we had trouble communicating our need of investigating causes of the accident to the prosecutors, whose responsibility was to preserve potentially incriminating evidence and hold relevant parties accountable,” Young said.
“Through the discussions at this committee last month, Ministry of Justice officials became aware of our predicament and decided to help sort out differences between the two agencies,” Young added.
A task force was set up at the end of last month to ensure that board investigators can directly contact deputy chief prosecutors nationwide and request access to the evidence, he said.
“We are now able to speed up our investigation of the accident, since the formation of the task force. Slight delays are still to be expected in certain parts of the investigation, but they will not be substantial,” Young added.
The board has yet to finish compiling all of the collected data, he said, adding that it would not start analyzing the data and identifying causes of the incident until after the data report is published in January.
Rules governing the investigation of major transportation accidents require the board to first establish the facts and make them public before publishing a final report, in which board investigators would identify causes leading to the incident and recommend safety improvements.
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