Officials: Head-on crash in Haiti leaves over 20 dead, dozens injured
A head-on crash between two public buses in Haiti has left at least 21 dead and up to 30 others injured, the head of the country’s disaster emergency response agency said Thursday.
The accident occurred Wednesday afternoon along National Road No. 1 in the town of Arcahaie, north of Port-au-Prince, when a minibus trying to pass another vehicle collided with a 43-seat passenger bus returning to Haiti from the Dominican Republic, witnesses said.
It is the latest fatal crash in a country where road accidents are a daily occurrence and often turn tragic as overcrowded buses, private vehicles and motorcycle taxi drivers, speed through narrow, potholed roads, often trying to illegally pass one another.
The incident also comes as Haiti’s public transportation sector grapples with an increase in robberies and kidnappings as both drivers and passengers fall prey to criminality. In the southern region of the country, protesters have erected barricades, demanding the release of a kidnapped local official. Bus drivers and travelers have been stuck for days, as traffic remains paralyzed between there and the capital.
Witnesses told emergency responders with the Civil Protection office that the minibus, headed toward Port-au-Prince from the rural town of Pont-Sondé near St. Marc, tried to pass another vehicle when it ended up in the same lane as the Gonaives-bound bus and the two collided head-on.
“The one that is the smaller one, we have 18 fatalities in it,” Jerry Chandler, the head of the Civil Protection said. “The bigger one that rolled over the smaller one and crashed, we had three fatalities in it.”
Chandler said an initial evaluation showed there were about 30 people injured and evacuated to nearby hospitals and medical centers.
“Right now, we are in the process of figuring out which patients have been discharged and which ones need more acute care and need to be evacuated to more specialized centers in Port-au-Prince or Mirebalais,” he said.
Dr. Garnel Michel, who heads Services Techniques et Opérationnels pour Pallier aux Accidents, or STOP Accidents, a non-government organization working to reduce traffic deaths in Haiti, said the total number of people killed or injured in the crash remains unclear.
A road safety volunteer from the organization said a driver aboard the minibus reported that there were only 14 passengers inside, all of whom died, Michel said. The volunteer counted an additional corpse, making it 15, Michel said, adding that it had also been raining.
“One of the problems we have with these accidents is the fact that this sector isn’t regulated, which makes it difficult to even get numbers,” Michel said.
In its latest report, the group registered 18 traffic deaths and 86 injuries between April 19 and April 25.
“This one was one of the worst and it opened our eyes to these accidents but it’s every day that accidents are happening,” he said. “We don’t really know how many people are dying every day in traffic accidents, which is why this has remained an invisible problem.”
Michel said the accident could have been worse. The larger bus had already dropped off most of its passengers in Port-au-Prince when the accident occurred.
STOP Accidents was formed in 2016 by Michel and other employees of the National Ambulance Center. As the director of the ambulance center, Michel said he created a specialized unit to monitor road accidents after realizing that many of their calls were for vehicle crashes.
The organization’s goal is to raise awareness through road safety campaigns, train people how to respond to accidents, encourage passengers to be more proactive about safety when traveling on public buses and lobby the government for change.
“The biggest problem is that there are a bunch of actors who are supposed to intervene in accidents, and there is no coordination between them,” Michel said. “But the one who can really resolve this problem and diminish the number of accidents if it has the political will is the state.”
This story was originally published April 29, 2021 at 1:47 PM.
