Six Mexican workers were killed and three others seriously injured in a gruesome accident involving an express bus and a cargo truck in upstate New York near the Canadian border.
New York State Police (NYSP) responded to a collision between the bus and the Freightliner truck around 6 am Saturday on State Highway 37 in Louisville. The injured were traveling on the express bus and were transported to various hospitals, reported CNN.
The bus was owned by LBFNY, a central installer of New York solar farms. Yesterday the six victims were identified as Mexicans and will be buried in that country, he explained. 7News, citing a local funeral home. Three of the deceased were natives of Puebla: Alejandro Vázquez Valdez (45), Jesús Martínez Parra (44) and Pedro Pablo Galicia Ignacio (29); two from Chiapas: Abel de Jesús López López (39) and Jonatan Hernández Gómez (25); and José de Jesús Aguirre Tronco (35), from an unspecified location.
There were 15 people on the express bus and one in the truck, according to Matthew Denner, director of St. Lawrence County Emergency Services.
“The facts about the cause of this accident are unknown,” spokesman Randolph P. Ryerson of Penske, the rental company for the truck involved, said in a statement Sunday.
Route 37 had to be closed near the scene for almost 12 hours. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced that it was launching a six-member team to conduct a safety investigation into the fatal collision and that the investigation could take between 12 and 18 months.
“As the two vehicles approached, the truck crossed the center line of the highway and collided with the bus,” said Tom Chapman, a member of the NTSB. He added that he did not know if the bus had seat belts for all the occupants.
Mayor Mike Zagrobelny of Waddington, a town near the scene of the accident, thanked first responders from across the county who helped in a Facebook post.