Multiple fatalities, including children, were reported Friday after a tour bus with about 50 passengers headed back to New York City from Niagara Falls crashed into a ditch, state police said. The bus rolled over after losing control for “unknown reasons,” injuring several people, New York State Police spokesperson James O’Callaghan said at a news conference. #CNN #News
00:00We do have breaking news out of New York State, which is where investigators are giving an update after a crash involving a bus and a semi truck along the New York State Thruway. Here is that update from moments ago.
00:13We had a vehicle collision, a significant vehicle collision. It is a tour bus coming out of Niagara Falls back to what we believe New York City, and it had about 50 plus passengers on that, women, children, also the bus was traveling eastbound.
00:30Right before the Pembroke exit, and for unknown reasons, the vehicle lost control, went into the median, overcorrected, and ended up in the ditch, which would be on the right side of the roadway or the south side of what would be the 90.
00:42And at this time, we have multiple fatalities, multiple entrapments, and multiple injuries.
00:47You can see behind me the amount of first responders from a lot of different police agencies besides New York State Police, fire, EMS, helicopters.
00:56A lot of people are being taken to Strong Memorial Hospital and Erie County Medical Center at this time with a lot of different injuries and a lot of different things going on.
01:06But like I said, this is an ongoing incident. We don't have all the answers. We don't have the total tally of people as of this time.
01:13But if you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer whatever you have.
01:17Do you know what company it was, the tour company?
01:20We have the company. We're in contact with them. We're working with them on their kind of where they're going, where they're coming from, getting a list of the passengers and their names and all of the details like that.
01:30That's something that's ongoing right now. They are cooperating. We are working with them.
01:34We are working with getting footage off of the bus at that time.
01:37Are people still being rescued at this point?
01:39Absolutely. There's a lot of rescues. We still have entrapments. We still have people. We don't know their whereabouts.
01:45We're assuming that we need that count, the passenger count, so we can count how many injuries we have, how many fatalities or how many possible entrapments.
01:54Like I said, the bus did roll. There are multiple ejections. There are multiple people trapped and there's multiple fatalities.
02:00And this includes children as well.
02:02How many agencies are responding to this?
02:05I'm sorry.
02:06Massive response over here. How many agencies do you have or how many people, if you have an estimate?
02:11Just walking through it, I know Genesee County Sheriff's Department is here. We're here.
02:15Pretty much any fire EMS from the area is here.
02:19Like I said, we have the DOT and we have the Thruway Authority closing the lanes, trying to shift people around, trying to get people off from being stranded on the 90.
02:29That's also an importance. People have families, people have kids, people travel, and we don't want people sitting on the 90 without food, without the proper necessity.
02:38So they are working at the same time we are working.
02:40They're working to clear and turn around those Thruways, clear the people out, and that's why you're going to see a large amount of people moving in a lot of different directions.
02:48It's a very volatile scene. You have to remember that we have vehicles going the wrong way on the 90, but it's to clear traffic out.
02:55We want to make sure we're taking care of our travelers as well as we're taking care of the people related in this incident.
03:00Well, we hear that it's a tourism bus. Can you talk about the nationalities, or is that information not available right now?
03:09Nope. The nationalities, most of the people speaking on the tour bus would be Indian, Chinese, and Philippine.
03:14So we have all that. We have translators coming in to work with those languages.
03:20But right now, like I said, we have a lot of people injured. We have a lot of people over there.
03:24You're going to see people coming in and out of here. A lot of ambulances.
03:27You can see there's helicopters lined up behind me.
03:29Depending on who we have, we have people entrapped. They may be alive but entrapped.
03:34And depending on those injuries, that's why we have the staging with the helicopters.
03:37Because depending on their injuries and how significant they could be, we will take them to stronger Erie County Medical Center.
03:44Just a point of clarification, the fatalities, does that include...
03:46We have been listening there to James O'Callaghan.
03:49He is with the New York State Police, a trooper informing the public an update on this crash between a bus and a semi-truck.
03:57He says that it is an ongoing scene. There are 50-plus people involved.
04:02There were ejections as the bus rolled multiple times. There are people trapped.
04:06There are fatalities, including children.
04:09This is a look at the scene where this took place.
04:12We heard there from Trooper O'Callaghan that this was a bus of tourists of Indian, Chinese, and Filipino folks that were visiting the area.
04:22We heard Governor Kathy Hochul earlier call this collision tragic.
04:25Obviously, officials there are working as fast as they can to find anyone who may be alive and trapped inside the wreckage.
04:31This is an incredibly sad scene.
04:33And what's clear, listening to that update from moments ago, is that they don't even at this point have full visibility of the scale of this.
04:42Because there have been ejections.
04:43They don't have a passenger count.
04:46And they have some people who are trapped.
04:48And they're trying to get a handle on where everyone is.
04:52But how did this happen?
04:53And that's really the question.
04:54And we heard there from law enforcement that this bus was heading eastward.
05:02When it veered into the median, he said, overcorrected, ended up in the ditch.
05:10We know it rolled, it appears, at least once.
05:13Right?
05:13Is that the case?
05:14And that is why you're seeing such an incredibly significant situation here that has shut down traffic in both directions as we're still trying to get a full handle on the scope of this tragedy.
05:30Yeah, we're joined now live by former Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis.
05:34Ed, just given what you've learned from law enforcement just in that press briefing, what do you make of what we said, the fact that this is still an ongoing scene?
05:44What is the process of processing this scene like?
05:46Yeah, the police are actually being very guarded in what they say right now.
05:57The public officials have to maintain confidentiality of the victims' names and things like that and the extent of the injuries.
06:03But this is obviously a terrible tragedy on our nation's roads.
06:07And one of the things that the police will be doing is sort of balancing that necessity of rescuing people.
06:17And in this case, using heavy equipment sometimes to have to lift that bus up.
06:22If there are rejections, people could actually be trapped under the vehicle.
06:26So you need to do this with kid gloves because you need to maintain evidence and make sure you're not harming anybody else.
06:34But there's also an urgency of sort of getting to the victims and making sure that everyone's accounted for.
06:41After that, they'll be looking at mechanical issues.
06:45They'll go over that bus with a fine-toothed comb to see if there were steering problems or braking problems.
06:51The statement that the bus oversteered and went off the road, sometimes that's as a result of a mechanical thing.
07:01But they'll also be looking at things like impairment of the driver and the experience of the driver and things like that and whether or not other vehicles were involved.
07:08So there's a lot to do with the scene of a case like this.
07:11Most troubling when there's children involved.
07:13And when you're talking about a bus, right, and they're needing it at this point possibly to lift the bus, we see them working around the bus,
07:23how do they get the help they need there when you have traffic so impacted the way it is both ways?
07:33That's another complication to this.
07:35I've seen situations where the highway has been shut down and emergency vehicles have to come in the wrong way,
07:43you know, get on an access route that's beyond the scene of the incident and then drive in the area that's been shut down.
07:53But they will be trying to worm their way through traffic there.
07:57And one of the problems is when you're dealing with a piece of heavy equipment like a bus,
08:04you need to have large wreckers and rotators to get that bus supported so that rescue personnel can get underneath it.
08:14Fire departments have a lot of heavy-duty equipment,
08:18but sometimes it's not enough when you're dealing with a commercial vehicle like this.
08:22And, Ed, we've just learned from law enforcement that the bus driver is alive.
08:29We don't know if that person is now cooperating with officials or their status, but we do know that they are alive.
08:36What does that mean for a potential investigation?
08:42Well, detectives will be at his bedside or wherever he happens to be trying to talk to him.
08:48You know, if there's any indication of illegal activity and that he may or may not be in custody,
08:55they'll have to provide him with his Miranda warnings.
08:59And if he does, you know, opt to get an attorney, they'll have to back off.
09:06But if he does not and he agrees to talk to them, that is a single most important point.
09:12A witness, the actual operator, someone who can tell you exactly what happened,
09:17is going to lead that investigation in the best way possible.
09:21But again, in these, you know, initial hours, it's all about rescue and saving people's lives.
09:28And can you talk, Ed, about the unique difficulties of buses?
09:34I mean, a lot of times people are on buses, they might not be wearing seatbelts.
09:40And when you see a situation like this, I think a lot of people that are on a bus,
09:45they think they're not going to crash, right, like they would in a car.
09:50This leaves them vulnerable.
09:55It does.
09:56The lack of seatbelts has been a big debate for many years.
09:59And, you know, that's still unfortunately the case in many of the vehicles out there.
10:05And, you know, when I'm driving on the road, most buses and most commercial vehicles abide by the law,
10:13go a reasonable speed, and they should because these vehicles are extremely hard to manage.
10:20But every once in a while, you'll see a bus or a track-to-trailer unit in the far left lane
10:27driving along with the race cars.
10:29And they just don't have the mechanical capability to be able to handle those high speeds.
10:35And so when you see that happening, you really have to question the, you know,
10:41the driver and whether or not there's any criminal liability here.
10:46If you do something that is illegal and it results in serious injury or death to people,
10:52not only have you failed them, but you've committed serious crimes.
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