Bus with Job Corps students crashes in Seattle
Two buses slide down an icy E. Thomas St., one crashing through the guide rail and suspended over I-5, in Seattle on Friday, Dec. 19, 2008. AP Photo/Seattle Post-Intelligencer,Dan DeLong
SEATTLE (AP) — Students from Columbia Basin Job Corps in Moses Lake safely escaped two buses after they crashed in Seattle, one going through a guardrail and dangling 20 feet above the Interstate-5.
Seattle Fire Department spokesperson Helen Fitzpatrick said 11 young adults were taken to Harborview Medical Center with minor injuries.
Fitzpatrick said there was no danger of either bus falling from the high bulkhead next to the freeway. She said all the approximately 75 passengers were able to get off the buses before emergency vehicles arrived at the scene.
The state Department of Transportation closed the freeway lanes below.
The cause of the accident was not immediately known, but winter weather has left many city streets coated with ice.
Jesse Till, 20, of Tacoma, was on one of the buses and said he sensed that something was wrong as it started down the hill above the freeway. Till told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper that he and a friend were sitting in the first row, which was left hanging in midair.
“I was watching the cars drive below us,” Till said, adding that he was thinking, “I’m going to die.”
Passenger Reco Collins, 16, told the newspaper that one bus crashed into the railing and was then struck by the second bus, pushing it farther over the side.
“We were going down the hill and the hill was very icy and the driver tried to turn and we ran into the other bus and it knocked it … into the guardrails and windows in our bus just shattered,” passenger Nicole Maxie told KING-TV.
“Everybody was just screaming, crying. Everybody had to climb out the emergency windows,” Maxie said.
Maxie said the buses were carrying students with the Columbia Basin Job Corps home from Moses Lake for Christmas break.
The buses were part of a three-bus caravan bound for downtown Seattle’s Greyhound bus station. The third bus was not involved in the accident.
The buses were chartered from Northwestern Trailways, a man who answered the phone at the company told The Associated Press. He declined to give his name.