A Greyhound bus carrying 41 passengers and the driver was involved in a crash with a pickup truck in Western Kansas this week. One person in the pickup truck was killed at the scene, though it isn’t yet clear whether that was the driver or a passenger, and there were several passengers on board the bus who were reportedly injured, some seriously.
According to the Kansas Highway Patrol, the accident occurred early on Wednesday morning. Both vehicles were eastbound on Interstate 70 in Trego County, Kansas when the incident took place. Little is known about what sparked the accident, though it appears that the bus collided with the pickup truck, which was hauling a trailer. No information has been released as to the identity of the victim. As for the Greyhound bus passengers, sixteen of them required transport to local hospitals and three of them were injured seriously enough that they required hospitalization.
According to Patrol spokesman Tod Hileman, a team of investigators is continuing to gather information in order to determine exactly what happened and whether any charges need to be filed. The Greyhound Bus Company sent another bus to the scene to pick up the passengers who were not taken to the hospital and to continue transporting them to their destination – the bus had been headed from Denver to Kansas City.
Greyhound is a Texas-based company and is the largest of its kind in the United States. It provides transportation to passengers throughout the United States as well as into Mexico and Canada. The company has already recorded a number of accidents for calendar year 2014, including a situation that occurred in January when a passenger attacked the driver of a bus in Arizona. That incident resulted in two dozen passengers requiring hospitalization. In another incident that took place in early April a Greyhound bus was involved in a fatal accident involving a wrong-way driver near the border between Florida and Georgia. In that incident a 91-year old man was headed the wrong way on Interstate 75 and struck both an SUV and the bus. The 91-year old was killed, as was the driver of the SUV. In that incident thirteen Greyhound passengers sustained injuries.