Tour bus carrying 23 people on a graduation trip in Hsinchu rolls backwards over a 800 foot cliff after stalling. Many people were flung out of the bus as it rolled over and over. Not sure why the brakes couldn’t hold it and keep it from going off the road .
Driver is alive but 13 passengers dead at the scene, all others suffered minor to major injuries and are in hospitals.
Accident happened at around 330pm and rescuers were still trying to get everyone out dead or alive at night fall.
Thanks for the vid, Tommy.
Today’s Taipei Times says the driver was properly licensed and the bus had been inspected, and that medium-sized buses like this one were allowed on that road. The paper says it’s suspected that the accident may have just been a result of rainy weather and a slippery road.
The paper also says the passengers were mostly people over 60 years old who were participating in a class reunion for Taishan Elementary School.
It happened near an Atayal community called Smangus Village, and Atayal participated in the rescue.
Your vid shows people working in the dark, and the paper describes Smangus as “hard-to-reach.” Wikitravel describes it as “remote.” wikitravel.org/en/Smangus
I guess this is Smangus, or thereabouts, on Google Maps: is.gd/SmangusRoad .
Couple of years ago I was taking some summer interns to a trip at the Huisun Forest Station in Nantou and our bus almost pulled the same s**t. The driver made it stall on a bend and was absolutely unable to get it going again (it was actually slipping backwards every time he releases the brakes). He absolutely refused to let us out while trying to figure out what was wrong (saving face…?). Pretty scary stuff. Some of the youngest girls were terrified.
It looks like in this case the driver was certified, but if his licence exam is as serious as the one people take for driving cars, I’m not sure counts for much.
Is manual shifts really worth all this trouble? Just get an automatic and people stop dying…
You don’t work for the DOT by any chance, do you? That sounds like the exact rationale they use for handing out licenses. “Taiwan doesn’t need a driving test like you foreigners. Our cars have automatic transmission.”
WTF? Under those circumstances I would have been tempted to haul him out of the vehicle.
This particular crash probably was caused mainly by bad weather. OTOH, a competent driver would have the skills, judgement and authority necessary to say “sorry folks, it’s too dangerous. We’re going home”.
This reminds me of my first week in Taiwan. I took a bus ride to Hsinchu. We’re on the highway, I’m looking at the scenery, getting a feel for Taiwan and notice an Ambulance with its lights flashing up ahead. Its trying to merge and the bus is in the far right lane of the highway. The moment I see the ambulance the bus starts accelerating. As the merging lane joins us, the bus is still accelerating. The ambulance is also going full blast but the bus is pulling ahead. As the merging lane runs out the bus is still going pedal down trying to out run the ambulance. The bus even veers to the right to close the gap and cut off the ambulance. The ambulance finally slammed on the break and merged behind the bus. A few moments later the ambulance came around and outran the bus. I was truly astonished. There were other people on the bus chatting quietly and nobody even missed a beat. There was no gasps or any palpable change in the atmosphere. Later on I talked to some locals and they agreed that this was common in Taiwan and there have even been deaths because the ambulance could not get to the people in time. For all the great things in Taiwan, behavior like this is unacceptable and will forever sully the image of Taiwan in my heart. Shameful Taiwan, very shameful.
Automatics have their disadvantages, too. Especially on slippery roads, you can’t disengage the clutch and recover the vehicle out of a slinger.
I learned it the hard way when I came on plain ice with my car and the automatic transmission started to change gears. Something I’d never do in a situation like this.
And just this morning there was another one, in Alishan… 
There is only one road to Smangus and it’s single-lane with car-sized passing points. There is no way that large vehicles should be permitted to drive on it. Some of the curves are so tight that tour buses have zero margin of error. It’s not uncommon to see tour buses backing up to have multiple attempts at making a turn.
You don’t work for the DOT by any chance, do you? That sounds like the exact rationale they use for handing out licenses. “Taiwan doesn’t need a driving test like you foreigners. Our cars have automatic transmission.”
WTF? Under those circumstances I would have been tempted to haul him out of the vehicle.
This particular crash probably was caused mainly by bad weather. OTOH, a competent driver would have the skills, judgement and authority necessary to say “sorry folks, it’s too dangerous. We’re going home”.[/quote]
As per the lovely computer animations, the bus was going uphill, met a small car, tried to back up so the smaller car would pass … and slipped. Skills, visibility, bad weather, all combined for a tragedy. More than half the passenger dead. Why so many dead? Elderly people. A deep ravine. And a heavy bus.
We once had a similar tragedy back home, a chicken bus. To make it worse, they had loaded a truck part -the axle- in the middle of the bus. When it bounced, it killed a lot of people.
Scary… I was on a bus just about that size this weekend, on narrow, rain-soaked mountain roads not far from that area… Yeesh…
Is this the road? is.gd/SmangusRoad
Thanks. I no longer feel like the Lone Ranger. When I saw that road on Google Street View, to me it didn’t look like a good idea for a bus to be on it even in good weather.
I don’t think hansioux was offering that as a substitute for training. I think he was referring to the situation that Novaspes’ description implied (unless I’ve misunderstood something), that of the left foot being on the clutch, the right foot being on the accelerator pedal, and thus no foot being on the brake, while one is attempting to start the vehicle on an incline. (I’m not much of a driver, but I think this problem can be solved by putting the vehicle in neutral, thus freeing one’s left foot for the brake. It might also be an excellent idea to pull up the hand brake (or to activate the iPad brake app via satellite through the mainframe at Fort Meade, or whatever it is the hip young folk do nowadays) before doing anything.)
But maybe now we’re not so sure the bus stalled?
Anyway, Hamletintaiwan says there’s a downside to the automatic transmission in this kind of situation.
I’ve been on that road a couple of times. I drove part-way once, but it wasn’t all paved like it is now. It felt scary just to walk. There’s no way I’d take a bus, unless I really, really had to. That said, I know a foreigner who has driven his mercedes many times to Smangus.
Feel really sad for the people involved, but restrictions on bus use on mountains roadsshould be considered.
I feel sad, too. Maybe they’ll change the rules.
Here’s the shot from the other car, as the bus just slips and topples over: ettoday.net/news/20121210/137602.htm (video at the end of the page)
And how the smaller car may have played a part -or is getting the blame- ettoday.net/news/20121210/137560.htm
Yes, those roads for such big buses, it’s tempting fate. And the problem is that there are way too many buses on weekends.
Looks like it.
Drive anywhere in the mountains and you are guaranteed to get stuck behind some numbnuts driving a tour bus. And these fuckers never, ever pull over to let the 100 trailing cars pass.
There are two ways to deal with a hill start. You can lift the clutch enough to partially engage, which holds the vehicle in place (I believe an automatic transmission does this, so to that extent it substitutes for skill). Or you can engage the handbrake and release as you bring in the engine torque using the clutch and accelerator. Sure, it takes a fair number of driving hours to do that flawlessly, but wouldn’t that be routinely expected of someone in charge of dozens of lives?
I wonder how many airline pilots whine about the necessity of manually setting control surfaces for landing and takeoff when there ought to just be a button you can press to let the computer deal with it? Manual controls that get you “close to the metal” are vital in exactly this sort of emergency situation because they give you precision control over the machine. Unless you don’t know how to use them, of course.
I’ve never driven a bus, but even with a 3-tonne truck I can imagine an automatic transmission would be a right pain in the ass. It simply wouldn’t allow you to control the vehicle adequately.
Well … yes, but it would also be nice if bus company owners had a few milligrams of social responsibility and common sense. You shouldn’t need the gubmint to come and tell you that small roads and big buses don’t mix. There are such things as minibuses and 4WDs.
Thanks for the links, Icon.
Beware! I’m using Google Translate! All bets are off!
This is just from the first link.
When I looked at the video, it looked to me as if he just backed up too far, but it looks like one of the passengers said, rather, that the bus stalled:
And the news report says that a repairman had something to say about it:
I think it’s saying that stalls are usually caused by inadequate power, misuse of the clutch, or shifting into the wrong gear. (I knew that.) I think it’s also saying that with only half the air pressure left (have I got that right?), the brakes may not work. (I doubt if I ever knew that, but if I did, I forgot it.)
So now I finally get that I’m making the mistake of thinking like a car driver, and an old-fashioned one at that. I guess it’s also possible that there was no emergency brake? With a big vehicle like that, maybe an emergency brake isn’t feasible?
Edit:
Some of what I’m reading on the 'net indicates that buses have emergency brakes, but that apparently they are air-powered, so engine failure may cause them to stop working.
I wonder what kind of steering the bus had? I read that if the engine stops it’s very difficult to steer a vehicle with hydraulic steering. (I think I already knew that.) But the same article said that with electric steering, you can keep steering after the engine stops. (I didn’t know that.) absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Steering
No, they shouldn’t, but if they do, well, they do.
Problem is that it’s not easy to do that with a bus. The handbrake is usually in a weird location and you don’t have the same feeling than with a car.
Playing with the clutch, you have the problem that the engine won’t rev quick enough and that you’ll burn it pretty quick if you don’t succeed in your first attempt. One solution is to use the right foot on both brake and accelerator, but it ain’t fool proof.
Driving a bus is not comparable to driving a car, requires much more skill.
One reason why bus/coach/truck use manual transmission is that when you go downhill, you don’t want to use the brakes. You want to put your engine in a lower gear and use your brakes only when you have to. Else they overheat and become useless.
I personally hate cars with automatic transmission, they don’t let you do what you want.