A tour group from Lower Bavaria had a serious accident with their bus after a toboggan trip near Schladming in Austria. A 31-year-old died when the bus left the road and fell several meters down an embankment, as reported by the fire brigade near Schladming in Styria on Sunday. The accident alarm was received there on Saturday evening at 11:17 p.m. According to the Red Cross, the 51-year-old driver was particularly badly injured, four other occupants seriously and 26 slightly injured. A total of 32 men were on board.
The bus was registered in the district of Rottal-Inn. “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) on request.
“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 fire brigade 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 beige 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, had only practiced a large-scale operation in the vicinity last year, which assumed a situation similar to that which became reality in the accident, as the fire brigade spokesman said.
The workshop owner was also on site quickly. He opened the building and gave hot drinks to the slightly injured. Some passengers and the driver were trapped in the crashed 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 because it was in a precarious position and threatened to fall, 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. He himself and his 14-year-old son in the passenger seat, as well as the 41, 38, 22 and 19-year-old occupants of the minibus and five children between the ages of seven and twelve were injured.
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.