BUS IN MOTORWAY CRASH Seventeen taken to hospital

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32701, 2 September 1971, Page 14

BUS IN MOTORWAY CRASH Seventeen taken to hospital

• (New Zealand Press Association) AUCKLAND, September 1. Seventeen people were taken by ambulance to hospital tonight after a spectacular crash involving a bus carrying about 40 members of an Australian schoolboy football party and four other vehicles on the Southern Motorwav.

Minutes after the crash, in which the bus and another vehicle careered across the median strip, both lanes on the motorway looked like a battlefield.

The five vehicles covered both lanes and people from other vehicles travelling along the motorway ran forward to help the injured. A man in a car equipped with a radio-telephone called his base, which called the ambulances. TRAFFIC DIVERTED Ministry of Transport officers closed both lanes of the motorway shortly after the accident happened, about 8.15 p.m. Both north-bound and south-bound traffic had to be diverted. The south-bound lane remained closed until 9.45 p.m., but in the north-bound lane tow trucks managed to clear the crashed vehicles by 9 o’clock.

All the passengers in the bus are believed to be from the Balmain area of Sydney

and are in New Zealand with two Rugby league teams from the St Joseph’s Junior Football Club, Rozelle, Balmain, Sydney.

There were understood to be about 40 people in the bus, most of them children. But, surprisingly, none of the children, aged nine and 10, were injured. There are 73 people in the complete Australian party, which today took a rest from football and made a trip to Rotorua. They travelled in two buses. The first arrived back at its Manurewa motel tonight and its passengers waited there for 35 minutes before discovering why the other bus was late. ' TRAIL OF VEHICLES Although the accident left a trail of damaged vehicles in both lanes ever a 100-yard stretch, no-one was seriously injured. Twelve adults travelling with the bus party received minor injuries mostly cuts, bruises and shock.

Five people in the other vehicles involved in the crash were taken to different hos-

pitals. None was seriously injured.

The police in Otahuhu were not certain late tonight how the accident happened, but they said it appeared there were three separate collisions “all rolled up into one.” “STRIP CROSSED”

One police officer who attended the smash said the accident happened when a south-bound utility vehicle crossed the median strip. The bus, which was travelling towards Auckland in the north-bound lane, tried to avoid the vehicle and spun over the strip into the southbound lane, he said. The utility vehicle narrowly missed another car travelling in the north-bound lane and spun further into the lane. Another car, which came to a stop a few feet from the bus, was shunted into the bus when a southbound" vehicle crashed into it. PASSENGER’S ACCOUNT

Mr B. Savage, a passenger in the bus, said the accident happened about a mile south of the Otahuhu turn-off. “The first indication we had that something was wrong was a warning from the driver, who told us that a car travelling south had crossed the centre strip and was heading towards us on the wrong side of the road,” said Mr Savage. “He tried to swing the bus round to avoid the car. But we hit it. The bus hurtled across the centre strip and we finished up pointing north on the opposite side of the road.”