Northern Thai bus crash kills 13

7 Mar 2011

Thirteen passengers died when a bus ran off the road and dropped 100m into a ravine last Monday in northern Thailand. The tour bus was carrying teachers from a Mae Sai school when the accident happened in the Song Khwae District of Nan Province 225kms east of Chiang Mai City.

As well as the 13 who died in the crash, 17 other passengers were injured. When emergency services were called to the scene of the accident in Doi Jee Valley, ambulances quickly transported the injured to hospitals in the area, where seven of them were given urgent surgical and medical procedures.

The bus driver was killed in the crash and police investigators who attended the crash site believe that he was not familiar with the bendy road and lost control of the coach on a sharp curve. Of the other fatalities, 11 were on the teaching staff at Bandai Thepkanchana-upatham School.

Most of the passengers injured were also from the same school and, together with the deaths of the teachers, left the facility with a severe shortage of teachers ahead of the Thai National Test on Tuesday and Thursday. Despite the tragedy, teachers were brought in from other schools in the region to help prepare the school’s 400 pupils for the exams.

In a country where most long distance travel is either by bus or aeroplane, bus crashes do occasionally happen. The day before this tragic happening, five Thai tourists returning from Phuket to Bangkok were killed when the driver of their minibus rammed the back of a lorry near Cha Am.

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