Bus Fire Kills 10 Passengers In South Korea

This is a really horrible tragedy which appears to have been caused by negligence by the driver:

A fire on a tour bus killed 10 people Thursday night on a highway in Ulsan. Seven others on the bus, which was carrying 22 people including a tour guide and the driver, were injured.

About 10:10 p.m., the bus scraped against a crash barrier several times while changing lanes. It then caught fire.

The passengers could not get out because the crash barrier was blocking the door. Some of them managed to break the window and escape, but 10 people could not escape from the smoke and fire, survivors and witnesses said.

Firefighters extinguished the fire at 11:01 p.m. Only the frame of the bus was left.
The tour guide told police that they couldn’t find the emergency hammer, so the driver used a fire extinguisher to break the windows.

The driver, surnamed Lee, 49, claimed that one of the tires went flat and made the bus lose balance. He added he did not doze off. But police suspect he was speeding, based on traffic camera footage and testimony from some of the passengers that the bus was travelling at high speed before suddenly changing lanes.

Police will request an arrest warrant for the driver for accidental homicide, saying Lee did not drive safely enough. “The driver claims the accident was caused by a flat tire, so we will send the bus to the National Forensic Service for inspection,” Choi Ik-soo, chief of the Ulju Police Station, told journalists at a briefing. [Korea Times]

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