Bangkok, Thailand – Rescuers worked to recover children’s bodies from the charred wreckage of a Thai school bus on Tuesday after an accident turned the vehicle into an inferno, with more than 20 feared dead.
A blaze tore through the coach on a highway in a northern Bangkok suburb as it carried 38 children, aged between preschoolers to young teens, and six teachers on a school trip.
The victims’ bodies were so badly burned that officials are unable to give a precise death toll while identifying remains could take days.
Thai Interior Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said 21 people escaped from the blaze but 23 are still unaccounted for and likely to be dead.
Rescue workers put up screens around the wreckage to shield firefighters and investigators as they began recovering bodies.
“Some of the bodies we rescued were very, very small. They must have been very young,” Piyalak Thinkaew, who is leading the search, told reporters at the scene, adding that the fire started at the front of the bus.
“Their instinct was to escape to the back so the bodies were there,” he said.
The bodies are so badly charred that it is hard to identify them, he said.
Some of the children who survived suffered serious burns to their faces, mouths and eyes, doctors told the media.
The bus was one of three carrying children from Wat Khao Phraya Sangkharam school in the northern province of Uthai Thani to a science museum in northern Bangkok.
A video on the school’s Facebook page before the tragedy shows children in orange shirts in the former Thai capital, Ayutthaya.
One of the bus tires burst on the highway, sending it crashing into a barrier and triggering the inferno, rescuers said.
Video showed flames engulfing the bus as it burned under an overpass, huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky.
Poor road safety
Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra said the government would pay for the survivors’ medical treatment and compensate the victims’ families.
“As a mother, I would like to express my deepest condolences to the families of the injured and deceased,” she tweeted.
Meechai Sa-ard, a motorbike taxi driver, heard the disaster a kilometer away.
“There was smoke everywhere. Poor children, I heard they were very little,” he told AFP.
Thailand has one of the worst road safety records in the world, with unsafe vehicles and poor driving contributing to the high death toll.
Around 20,000 people are killed every year on the kingdom’s roads, according to the World Health Organization, more than 50 a day on average.
The economic losses caused by traffic deaths and injuries amounted to around US$15.5 billion in 2022, more than 3 percent of GDP, the organization reported.
