A tour bus carrying dozens of teenaged passengers was involved in a rollover crash when it left the highway and overturned off the roadside on the morning of Sunday, July 12, 2015. The crash took place on the A22 Autostrada highway, near Trento, a city in northwestern Italy. The bus was carrying dozens of students of Geschwister-Scholl-Gymnasium, all between the ages of 17 and 19, home to Bremerhaven, Germany following a school trip to southern Italy when the incident took place. Seventeen students were injured as a result of the accident, although all injured parties have now been released and are expected to make a full recovery.
A total of 45 people were on the bus at the time of the accident, and the exact cause of the crash is not yet known. Since the bus did not collide with any other vehicles and left the roadway for unknown reasons, preliminary reports have suggested that the driver may have been fatigued from long hours of driving and could possibly have fallen asleep at the wheel. Officials continue to investigate the crash at this time.
The bus veered into a thicket of vegetation to the side of the road and turned over onto its side, trapping all those inside of it until first responders arrived on the scene to free both injured and non-injured people from the overturned vehicle. All injured parties, including the bus driver, were transported to area hospitals and later released following treatment and evaluation for minor injuries. Unhurt parties were transported to a local auditorium while their injured peers were receiving treatment.
According to reports released by the Italian National Institute of Statistics, nearly 185,000 auto crashes resulted in either injury or fatality in 2012, with 3,650 deaths resulting from these incidents. These numbers represent a decrease of nearly 50 percent in injuries and fatalities since 1990.