Bus plunges into drain in Hafizabad, killing five and injuring 27

At least five people were killed and 27 injured when a passenger bus plunged into a drain in Punjab’s Hafizabad district early on Thursday, Rescue 1122 said, Dawn and The Express Tribune reported.

The crash happened near the Fatehke Drain Bridge in Pindi Bhattian tehsil. Rescue 1122 received the emergency call at 4:20am.

What caused it

The two reports differ on the cause and route:

• Rescue officials told Dawn the driver lost control because of overspeeding. They said the bus was travelling from Raiwind to Chiniot.
• Eyewitnesses cited by Rescue 1122 told the Tribune the driver became drowsy while making a U-turn and lost control. They said the bus was going from Lahore to Chiniot.

The rescue

Teams from Pindi Bhattian, including ambulances, motorcycle rescue and fire services, reached the site and began a rescue operation. Injured passengers were given first aid at the scene, and 20 of them were taken to the Tehsil Headquarters Hospital in Pindi Bhattian, according to the district rescue control room’s report. The others were treated at the site.

With help from the local government, a crane was brought in to lift the bus out of the drain, after which the bodies of five passengers were recovered from beneath it. The dead were young men aged 18, 20, 26, 27 and 28, according to the names and ages released by Rescue 1122 and reported by the Tribune. Rescue teams had continued searching the wreckage for some time amid fears that more passengers might be trapped beneath it, Dawn reported. The operation, supervised by District Emergency Officer Abdul Rasheed, was later declared complete.

Third deadly bus crash in a week

The crash follows two other deadly road accidents:

• Uthal: last week, 12 passengers were killed when a minibus and a passenger coach collided head-on near Zero Point on the Quetta-Karachi Highway in Balochistan.
• Rajanpur: days earlier, a passenger bus from Karachi to Dera Ismail Khan hit a road divider and overturned on the Indus Highway near Bangla Hidayat in Rojhan tehsil, killing at least 10. The bus struck the concrete divider between two under-construction roads, and eyewitnesses said the impact was so strong that it overturned. Dozens of passengers were injured.

Background: night journeys

The Hafizabad bus crashed in the dark, before dawn, on an inter-city run, and the Rajanpur bus was on a long-distance journey from Karachi. In Hafizabad, rescue officials and eyewitnesses both pointed to the driving: speed in one account, a drowsy driver in the other.

Why it matters

Three crashes in about a week have killed more than 25 people. Each was blamed on a familiar cause: speed, fatigue or a dangerous road layout. Those are problems that rules on driving hours, speed checks for inter-city buses and safer road design are meant to prevent.

What remains unclear is which account of Thursday’s crash is right, and whether anyone, the driver or the bus operator, will be held responsible.

This article draws on reporting by Dawn and The Express Tribune.