Bus plummets from Peru's 'Devil's Curve', killing at least 36 people
Updated
A bus travelling along a narrow stretch of Peruvian highway known as the "Devil's Curve" has tumbled off a cliff and onto a rocky beach, killing at least 36 people.
The bus was carrying 57 passengers to Peru's capital Lima when it was struck by a semi-trailer shortly and plunged down the slope, Claudia Espinoza from Peru's voluntary firefighter brigade said.
The blue bus came to rest upside down on a narrow strip of shore next to the Pacific, with the lifeless bodies of passengers strewn among the rocks.
Rescuers worked to pull victims from the hard-to-reach area in Pasamayo, about 70 kilometres north of Lima.
No road leads directly to the beach, complicating rescue efforts, Ms Espinoza said, though police and firefighters managed to transport six survivors with serious injuries to a nearby hospital.
Ms Espinoza said the passengers in the crash included many who were returning to Lima after celebrating the New Year's holiday with family outside the city.
The highway is known as the Devil's Curve because it is narrow, frequently shrouded in mist and curves along a cliff that has seen numerous accidents.
"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.
Traffic accidents are common along Peru's roadways, with more than 2,600 people killed in 2016.
More than three dozen died when three buses and a truck collided in 2015 on the main costal highway.
Twenty people were killed in November when a bus plunged off a bridge into a river in the southern Andes.
The nation's deadliest traffic crash on record happened in 2013 when a makeshift bus carrying 51 Quechua Indians back from a party in south-eastern Peru fell off a cliff into a river, killing everyone on board.
Miguel Sidia, a transportation expert in Peru, said while road conditions in the Andean nation had improved in recent years, a lack of driver education and little enforcement of road rules still led to many fatalities each year.
He called on authorities to immediately conduct studies into building a new highway farther from the cliff where the accident occurred.
"As a Peruvian, it's shameful," he said.
AP
Topics: accidents, disasters-and-accidents, peru
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