EA young man from Lower Bavaria died in a serious bus accident near Schladming in Austria. He had gone sledding with friends for his bachelor party. This is reported by the Bayern media group and other media on Sunday. Several men were also seriously injured when the bus left the roadway and fell down an embankment, according to the fire department.
There were a total of 32 men on the bus. The dead man and some other men came from the small town of Triftern, as its mayor Edith Lirsch said on Sunday. “It’s a tragic incident.” People in the small town know each other. Many of the young people are active in clubs. “That’s why you take a big interest.”
According to the Red Cross, the 51-year-old driver was particularly badly injured in the accident late on Saturday evening, four other occupants were seriously injured and 26 were slightly injured. The bus was registered in the district of Rottal-Inn, but there were also passengers on board from the neighboring district of Passau. “This tragic accident affects us very much and our thoughts are primarily with the family of the victim and with all the injured,” said the district administrator of the Rottal-Inn district, Michael Fahmüller (CSU).
Firefighters saw the accident by accident
The cause of the accident was initially unclear on Sunday. “The bus left the road at the last bend in the direction of Schladming, rolled over several times and then came to rest on a workshop building,” said the fire brigade’s operations manager, Gerald Petter. The bus lay on the left, partly on top of a vintage truck that the workshop owner had draped on the roof.
The passenger cabin was dented, most of the windows were shattered and the curtains were hanging out in tatters. A fire department video showed dented seats in the passenger cabin. On the ground was a hard hat that one of the men might have worn while sledding. “The coach was secured on the instructions of the Leoben public prosecutor’s office and will be examined by experts,” said the police.
The survivors were lucky in the misfortune: directly behind them was a bus with firefighters who jumped in immediately as first aiders. In addition, the Red Cross and fire brigade bases were not far away, so that a large contingent of more than 160 rescue workers was deployed within ten minutes. The 25 paramedics were supported by an emergency doctor and eight general practitioners.
In addition, the fire brigade, together with the Red Cross, only practiced a large-scale operation nearby last year, which assumed a situation similar to that which became reality in the accident, as the fire brigade spokesman said. In addition, the workshop owner was quickly on site. He opened the building and gave hot drinks to the slightly injured.
Difficult recovery
Some passengers and the driver were trapped in the bus and had to be freed with hydraulic rescue equipment, the fire department reported. The injured were taken to the hospitals in Schladming, Schwarzach and Salzburg. The salvage of the wreck was also difficult, according to the fire department. It first had to be supported before it could be recovered with a truck-mounted crane.
There were other serious accidents in the region over the weekend: in Lower Austria, for example, a minibus crashed into a ditch after colliding with a car on Saturday evening. Six children and five adults were injured. The driver skidded after a roundabout and drove into the oncoming fully occupied minibus, it said. On Saturday morning, two women and a man from Hungary were killed on the Griessen Pass south of Salzburg when their car crashed into an empty bus.