14ymedio, Havana, 10 January 2019 – A massive accident occurred this Thursday afternoon near the hill of La Herradura in the vicinity of kilometer 25 of the Guantánamo-Baracoa highway, leaving six people dead and about thirty injured.
The accident occurred when a Chinese-make Yutong bus from the Vía Azul company, which traveled the route from Baracoa to Havana, overturned after the bus lost control when the driver executed a maneuver to overtake another vehicle, some of the witnesses explained to the official press.
Dr. Yoandris Reyes, deputy surgical director of the Agostino Neto hospital in the city of Guantanamo, said that the facility received 33 injured and said that most came with orthopedic trauma, blows or friction burns. He added that there are five patients with code red, at high risk for their lives and that three of them received surgical care and two remain in the Intensive Care Unit.
A multidisciplinary team was activated in the health facility after the accident and specialists of the Ministry of the Interior were investigating other details of the event at the incident site.
It is the fourth accident on Cuban roads that involves a passenger bus in less than a month.
On December 27, two people were killed and 33 injured in a traffic crash involving a truck with a trailer loaded with sugarcane and a passenger bus from the state company Astro. On December 12 another crash, also with a passenger bus, left three dead and 29 injured in the vicinity of Mayarí, in the province of Holguín.
Also this week a passenger bus of the state company Transtur collided with a train at a railway-level crossing on the Bayamo-Las Tunas highway, a crash that left 12 injured.
In 2017, 11,187 traffic crashes were recorded in the country, leaving 750 dead and 7,999 injured, according to reports from the National Road Safety Commission. Since 2012, according to the same source, more than 4,400 deaths have been reported on Cuban roads. Three days ago, Minister of Transport Adel Yzquierdo was removed from his post a position he held since 2015.
Translated by Wilfredo Díaz Echevarria
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