At least 42 people,
most of them elderly, were killed when a coach collided with a lorry and caught
fire in southwest France on Friday, in the country's worst road accident for
three decades.
See more photos below;
The coach was carrying
a club of elderly people on an excursion when it collided with the lorry near
the village of Puisseguin among the vineyards of the St Emilion region, east of
Bordeaux.
Many of the victims
were thought to have died in the fire, according to emergency workers and local
authorities in the department of Gironde.
Images shown on French
television showed the coach as a charred shell that had been entirely burned.
"I saw a cloud of
smoke," said local resident Yvette Seguy on France's i-Tele TV station,
adding that it took place on a bend that is known to be dangerous.
The driver of the coach
was thought to be among the dead. The rest of the victims were passengers on
the coach, officials said.
Eight people managed to
escape the burning coach -- four of them seriously injured, according to a
local official.
It was not clear if the
lorry driver, who was transporting wood, also died. Unconfirmed reports said he
had managed to escape his burning vehicle to help the coach passengers.
"The French
government has fully mobilised after this terrible tragedy," President Francois
Hollande said from Athens, where he is on an official visit. "We are
plunged into sadness due to this drama."
The crash is the
deadliest in France since August 1982, when 53 people including 44 children
were killed in a motorway pile-up.
Some 60 firemen and 20
fire engines were dispatched to the scene on Friday, supported by helicopters.
A psychological crisis cell and information hotline were also set up.
Prime Minister Manuel
Valls, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve and Transport Minister Alain
Vidalies were also on their way to the site, according to the transport
ministry.
It has not been ruled
out that Hollande might cut short his visit to Greece.
Valls expressed his
"emotion in the face of this very heavy toll" on Twitter, and
promised his "support to the families of the victims".
- 'AN INCREDIBLE TRAGEDY' -
The coach, carrying 49
passengers and a driver, departed early Friday from a tiny village of 650
residents near the site of the accident.
Pierre Henri-Brandet,
spokesman for the interior ministry, told BFMTV that four people "were
extremely severely injured" two
with burns and two with head injuries. Four others escaped with only minor
injuries.
"It's an
incredible tragedy with an extremely heavy toll. It's a catastrophe," he
said. "They were retired people, elderly people, who were going on a day
out."
Henri-Brandet added
that the accident happened just a few minutes after the bus left the village of
Petit-Palais-Cornemps.
Details of how the
crash happened were still unclear.
"Apparently, the
bus slid into a bend," a local shopkeeper from Puisseguin told French
radio station RTL. "The truck and bus were in flames. We saw smoke from 10
kilometres away."
The group were part of
a club for retired people and were heading south to the nearby region of Landes
for a visit.
No comments:
Post a Comment