Tour bus crash hurts 22, mostly Chinese tourists

Staff writer, with CNA





Twenty-two people, mostly Chinese tourists, were injured yesterday when their tour bus hit an overpass in Kaohsiung, the Tourism Bureau said, adding that none of the injuries were life-threatening.

The accident occurred when the bus — carrying 28 people, including the driver, a tour guide and 26 tourists from China’s Zhejiang Province — tried to drive through a railway underpass that was too low for the vehicle, the bureau said.

The local fire department said seven of the injured were children, adding that they sustained minor injuries.

Passengers in a tour bus carrying a Chinese tour group are being treated yesterday at the site in Kaohsiung where the bus hit an overpass, injuring 22 of the passengers. Photo: Huang Liang-chieh, Taipei Times

The tourists were on a six-day trip that began on Wednesday.

The driver’s unfamiliarity with local streets and lack of alertness might have caused the accident, police said.

The driver, a Kaohsiung resident who has three years of driving experience, said he did not know that the underpass had a height limit of 2.8m, less than the height of the bus, because he had never traveled on that road before and was distracted by the tour guide when the accident took place, according to police.

A Chinese tourist is being treated at a hospital in Kaohsiung after a tour bus hit an overpass in the city, injuring 22 passengers, mostly Chinese. Photo: Chang Chung-yi, Taipei Times

The driver said he was neither drunk nor tired at the time of the accident.

China’s National Tourism Bureau paid close attention to the incident and called for greater security safeguards for Chinese tourists in Taiwan, China’s Xinhua news agency reported yesterday.

The accident came months after one of Taiwan’s most serious tour bus accidents involving Chinese visitors, when a bus carrying 24 members of a Chinese tour group and a Taiwanese tour guide en route to Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport crashed into a freeway guardrail and burst into flames.

Everyone aboard, including the driver, was killed in the incident on July 19 last year as the emergency doors could not be opened.

Prosecutors concluded that Su Ming-cheng (蘇明成), the bus driver who had immigrated from China, deliberately set fire to the vehicle because he was upset over family pressure and was being sentenced to prison in a sexual assault case.

Additional reporting by Reuters