More accounts have emerged on the events leading to the crash of a 59-passenger luxury bus on its way from Aba, Abia State, which plunged into a canal at Owode Elede, Lagos, killing three passengers and injuring 23 others.
One of the passengers in the bus, Kenneth Ohai, said as the bus hit the median around 3am on Friday morning and veered off the road, nosediving into the canal in the process, the little child his co-passenger was carrying on her lap bounced off the window and fell into the water.
He said the woman immediately dived out of the window to save her baby. Saturday PUNCH confirmed from the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency that the unidentified woman and her child were unharmed, as they were both rescued after.
According to LASEMA, the child could not have been more than one year old. Ohai, who was also one of the unharmed passengers rescued at the scene, explained that he believed that the driver must have been momentarily distracted before the crash.
“It was not as if there was a tyre blowout. Truly, if it had slowed down in that part of the road, the bus would not have hit the concrete demarcating the road.
“When it hit the median, the speed was too much for the driver to put the bus right and it went the other way again and hit the side of the canal. We were all screaming as it went down. The way it fell, I thought a lot of people would have died.”
Another survivor, Kelechukwu Ese, said many of his co-travellers escaped through the windows of the bus, adding that he could not explain how he found himself beside the canal.
He said, “I boarded the bus from Enugu State. I wanted to attend an event in Yaba, (Lagos). I sat by the window side and was asleep. Screams of other passengers woke me up. I thought I was dreaming. People started jumping out of the windows. And before I knew what was happening, I landed on the ground with my knees.
“I didn’t feel the pain initially and that was why I declined to be taken with others to a hospital after we were given first aid treatment. I am now feeling some pains.”
One of the three fatalities of the bus crash was the bus conductor, who was said to have fallen into the water because he sat beside the door.
A LASEMA official said that as he fell, the bus might have fallen on him. The rescue operation at the scene of the accident was carried out by officials of LASEMA, Lagos State Fire Service, Federal Road Safety Corps, Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps, National Emergency Management Agency, Lagos State Traffic Management Authority, Rapid Response Squad and operatives from the Owode Police Station.
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