OTTAWA — A popular tourist outing in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta turned into a scene of chaos after a glacier tour bus rolled on Saturday afternoon, killing three passengers and injuring 24 others on board, according to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
Cpl. Leigh Drinkwater of the mounted police said that the driver of the specially designed ice bus was among the survivors, although he had no knowledge of that person’s condition. Alberta health services said that 14 people had been taken to hospitals in “critical, life-threatening condition.”
The bus, which has oversize tires for driving on ice and similarly oversize sightseeing windows, was climbing a rocky, steep road to the Columbia Icefields in Jasper National Park when it plunged down an embankment, Corporal Drinkwater said. A photograph from a bystander posted by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation showed the red and white bus badly damaged and resting on its roof on rocky moraine.
It was not immediately known why the bus toppled over.
Emergency workers from a variety of agencies descended on the ice field shortly after the accident. At least one helicopter contracted out by Parks Canada, the federal parks agency, was used to lift the dead and injured from the crash site to five air ambulances up on the ice field or road ambulances down below on a nearby parkway.
The injured tourists were being treated in three nearby cities.
Tanya Otis, a spokeswoman for Pursuit, the company that operates tours of the ice fields, said the incident involved one of its special, all-terrain buses that allow visitors to walk on the glacier.
The ice fields are a major international tourist attraction and are part of the Athabasca Glacier, one of the largest in the Rockies, and it feeds three major water systems in Western Canada. While Parks Canada has said that the ice field has been melting for about 125 years, climate change has accelerated that process.
One witness said on Twitter that he was stuck with several other passenger on another “ice explorer” bus that was forced to stop after the incident The man wrote that he saw the other bus lose “control and roll over.”
Rob Kanty, who witnessed the rollover after finishing an earlier bus tour, said in an email that it appeared the bus had encountered a rock slide, although he said it was uncertain what role that had played in the crash. He added that the buses did not have seatbelts.
Corporal Drinkwater said that investigators had ruled out any criminal intent in the crash.
Source : Nytimes
