Bus Hits 32 Vehicles in Seongnam

A commuter bus crashed into 32 vehicles at a traffic light in Seongnam, just south of Seoul, injuring at least 57 people, The Independent reported, citing fire officials in South Korea’s Gyeonggi province.

Nine people were seriously hurt, but fire officials said none of the injuries appeared life-threatening. The bus struck the line of stopped vehicles before coming to rest on a median strip, with photographs from the scene showing a shattered windshield and a cluster of damaged cars around the intersection.

Emergency crews set up a medical station at the site to treat the injured, and provincial fire authorities deployed 88 personnel and 33 vehicles to the response. Most of the wrecked vehicles had been cleared by 9.30am local time, though the crash caused heavy congestion around an intersection near a residential complex.

What happened is clear enough in outline: a crowded rush-hour junction became the end point of a bus that did not stop. Why it happened is not yet settled.

Police were questioning the driver, who tested negative on a breathalyser test and told investigators that the brakes had failed, Park Chang-gon of Seongnam’s Bundang district police station said, according to the report. The driver was also injured and taken to hospital after being freed from the vehicle.

That brake-failure account remains only an initial explanation, not a finding. Police said they planned to examine the bus’s black box recordings and CCTV footage to determine the cause.

Mass-collision road crashes have a brutal way of spreading harm outward: one vehicle loses control, and suddenly dozens of ordinary journeys are interrupted by injury, emergency triage and a long police reconstruction of seconds that passengers and drivers did not choose. In this case, the fact that none of the seriously injured were said to be in life-threatening condition is the rare merciful detail inside a very large crash scene.