Peruvian police and officials reported at least 48 casualties in the accident that occurred at the so-called “Devil’s Curve,” where many accidents happened in the past. The bus tumbled down a cliff onto a rocky beach, on Tuesday.
Carrying 57 people and heading to Peruvian capital, Lima, the bus was hit by a truck and plunged down the slope, according to Claudia Espinoza, Peru’s voluntary firefighter brigade. The bus landed upside down and the passengers’ bodies spread on the rocks.
Six more individuals resulted injured, and at least three people are missing. “It’s very sad for us as a country to suffer an accident of this magnitude,” Peruvian President, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, said in a statement.
Preliminary investigations indicated that the GPS showed both the truck and bus were going too fast, according to a tweet from the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. Hundreds of firefighters rushed to the crash scene to rescue survivors and recover the bodies.
Police and firefighters had to use helicopters since no road leads directly to the beach. The six injured individuals were transferred to nearby hospitals.
Rescue operations continued late into the night. Authorities reported a suspect was detained for stealing the belongings of the victims.
Peru is about the size of Texas, California and Oklahoma combined, with at least 20 mountains eclipsing 19,000 feet in elevation. There are a lot of roads like the ‘Devil’s Curve.’
Travel accidents are common along Peru’s roadways, with more than 2,600 people killed in 2016. Twenty people died in November when a bus fell off a bridge into a river in the Andes.
The roadways are so dangerous that the U.S. State Department prohibits diplomatic staff from traveling by motor vehicle outside Lima at night, because of threats of armed bandits and poor road conditions.
This article was inspired by The Washington Post // A bus crash killed 48. What happened at Peru’s other Devil’s Curve might have been worse