And Flixbus bus overturned and ended up in an escarpment, this morning at 4 on the A16 Naples-Canosa motorway in the municipality of Vallesaccarda in the province of Avellino, after having run over two cars parked in the lane due to a violent rear-end collision. Then three other cars arrived and were involved in the crash. The toll of the accident is one dead and 14 injured.
Two accidents
From a first reconstruction, the five cars occupied almost the entire roadway motorway because they were involved in an accident. In this crash, a motorist died instantly, throwing himself from his car due to the impact. The bus arrived a few minutes later at the scene of the accident. But the driver was unable to avoid the collision with the cars. The vehicle overturned and ended up in the embankment on the right side of the road.
38 people on board
The bus, which left Lecce at 11pm on Saturday 3 June and headed for Roma Tiburtina with scheduled arrival at 7am, it had 36 passengers and two drivers on board. On the spot the firefighters who, with the help of a crane truck, lifted the vehicle from the escarpment to check if there were other victims. Three of 14 injured – two particularly serious – were transported to Ariano Irpino, three others to Avellino and eight to Benevento.
In Grottaminarda
The passengers of the bus and of the cars involved who did not need to resort to particular medical treatments were hosted in the municipal gymnasium of Grottaminarda. Here the doctors reported and assisted them. But all are in good condition: only a few have collars or bandages. At 6.45, the section of the A16 motorway between Candela and Grottaminarda, which had been closed due to the accident, was reopened – albeit on only one lane.
The witness
“They were all sleeping – said one of the passengers on the bus, a young man from Lecce – we were woken up by the violent braking and then the bang, when we collided with cars, before ending up in the escarpment”. The young man, who was then supposed to continue his journey from Rome to Florence, has a severe bruise on his back.
In 2013 the crash that caused 40 victims
This morning’s accident brought back memories of the massacre of 28 July 2013: on this same highway, a bus crashed on the Acqualonga viaduct, in the municipality of Monteforte, causing the death of 40 people, all originating from Pozzuoli. The passengers were returning to the Phlegrean city after a few days’ trip to the places of San Pio. The accident was caused by a failure that would have disabled the bus’s braking system. The driver tried in every way to slow down the vehicle, which had traveled over a million kilometres, approaching the barriers of the viaduct. But the protective guardrails failed to withstand the impact and the bus fell from a height of thirty meters. Thirty-eight people died instantly, two in the following days. Ten survivors.