2 buses skid down slick hill, barely avoid plunge to I-5
The scores of Seattle-area students enrolled in some Eastern Washington job-training program had extensive looked forward to Friday.
“Everybody woke up cheering and happy because we were going home,” uttered 17-year-old Freddy Laffite of Seattle, a scholar of the Columbia Basin Job Corps Center in Moses Lake.
But their trip home for the holidays nearly turned tragic Friday when two charter buses carrying 80 students slid into a denser consistence a steep ice-covered Seattle street and crashed through a guardrail 20 feet above Interstate 5. The front wheels of one bus ended up dangling over the freeway.
“We were quite screaming,” said 16-year-old Alex Hammell of Bothell, who was on the second bus. “I thought we were going to die.”
Laffite, Hammell and the others were able to escape by popping out turn of events windows and clambering outright the back of the buses or jumping from the top to the bottom of from broken windows.
Eleven students were taken to Harborview Medical Center with minor injuries, according to fire officials and Peggy Hendren, director of the Columbia Basin Job Corps.
The accident, which occurred in various places 12:30 p.m. at the intersection of East Thomas Street and Melrose Avenue, closed two lanes of the freeway and caused traffic backups that stretched for miles.
The accident is being investigated by Seattle police, who said the icy streets were a contributing factor.
How it happened
The buses, owned through Northwestern Trailways, were amid three that had convoyed from Moses Lake to Seattle, where parents were waiting at the Greyhound bus station. The buses also were scheduled to small quantity students in Tacoma and Olympia.
The Columbia Basin Job Corps Center is a free education and job-training program for people ages 16 to 24, according to its Web site. Most students live on the center’s Moses Lake campus. The program is administered by the U.S. Department of Labor.
The three buses got off I-5 at the East Olive Street exit and were headed north on Bellevue Avenue. They reached East Thomas Street, the first street on which they could turn left. But once on Thomas, the couple buses started sliding on the icy cobblestone road, police uttered. The third bus in the convoy was efficient to avoid the public way.
