New York State Police reported on Friday, July 22, that at least twenty people had been hospitalized following a collision between a semi truck and a tour bus near the city of Waterloo, New York.
The collision happened around 1:30 a.m., and according to local news reports, the vehicles caught fire shortly after the collision as well. The injured people were taken to a number of local medical facilities after the incident, and no word is yet released about their identities or medical conditions even several days later.
A particular incident of note is that a soldier from New York’s Fort Drum saw the scene and the fire, and stopped to help. He entered the burning bus and helped pull several injured people to safety before rescue crews arrived, an example of outstanding heroism and good Samaritanism.
The crash caused a temporary shutdown of both directions of traffic, but as of Saturday the road had been cleared and traffic was moving normally.
Once again, this is an incident that highlights the danger of sharing roads with semi trucks and tractor trailers. A tour bus is a large vehicle in and of itself, though usually not quite as massive as a tractor-trailer, and this one was hit so hard that it burst into flames following the impact.
The exact cause of the truck accident is unknown, and there could be many reasons for it. Driver error on the part of the trucker, mechanical failure, intoxication, fatigue from long hours of driving — there are numerous ways that this event could have occurred. But the fact of the matter is, however it happened, this semi truck caused twenty people to suffer injuries serious enough to force them to be hospitalized. Drivers must understand that they are sharing the road with highly-dangerous machines when semi trucks are nearby.
