11 killed as school bus plunges into pond
Print Edition
A TOTAL of 11 people, including eight kindergartners, were killed on Thursday when an overloaded minivan used as a school bus drove into a pond in central China’s Hunan Province, authorities said yesterday.
The accident happened about 5pm in the village of Ganzi, near the provincial capital Changsha. The van was carrying the children home from the Lelewang Kindergarten in the city of Xiangtan, said Wang Kemin, head of Hunan’s education department.
Besides the children, the driver and two teachers, aged 18 and 51, were also killed, Wang said.
An initial investigation has suggested overloading and the use of an unauthorized route as the main reasons for the accident, said Ge Jianzhong, the department’s deputy director.
The minivan, with a designed capacity of eight, left the school with 15 people onboard. Four children had got off the bus before the crash, which happened in a remote and sparsely populated area that was not on the official route.
The driver, who had taken the job only a few days before, was unfamiliar with the route and lacked training, said Li Youzhi, vice governor of Hunan.
The van was pulled out of the pond about 3am yesterday, with the bodies of the eight children and the driver still inside. The bodies of the two teachers were recovered about an hour later.
“It’s common for the bus to be overloaded,” said the father of one of the children killed in the accident.
Established in 2005, the private kindergarten has a roll of 180 children and 12 teachers. Classes have been suspended.
Hunan authorities said they will order an overhaul of school buses in a bid to avoid similar tragedies in the future.
The incident is the latest in a string of fatal school bus accidents in recent years that have sparked nationwide outrage over slack safety enforcement.
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