Six people were killed and two injured after a passenger bus flipped off a bridge and plunged into a river in northwestern Spain.
Six people were killed and two injured after a passenger bus overturned from a bridge and plunged into a flooded river in northwestern Spain, emergency services reported on Sunday.
Two survivors, the 63-year-old driver of the vehicle and a female passenger, were pulled from the river by firefighters by rope and taken to nearby hospitals with varying degrees of injuries.
The driver tested negative for alcohol and drugs, a police spokesman told the Reuters news agency.
The spokesman added that the search and rescue operation around the bridge had already concluded, while engineers were trying to find a way to safely recover the remains from the Lerez river.
The strong current of the river and its high flow due to heavy rains that hit the Galicia region hampered efforts to recover the bodies over the weekend.
The Monbus company bus was traveling between the cities of Lugo and Vigo and had stopped at a prison near the scene of the accident.
It veered off a straight path on the bridge for reasons that remain unclear and fell into the water in a drop of at least 130 feet around 9:30 p.m. local time.
The emergency services were alerted by a call from a passerby who noticed that the bridge’s protective barrier had been severely damaged. Shortly after, they received a second call from inside the bus as it was filling with water.
The river remained above its overflow threshold, forcing emergency rescue teams to suspend the operation for almost two hours before resuming it.
Authorities initially reported a total of nine people aboard the bus when it went down, according to driver testimony, though the count is now believed to be eight based on missing persons reports filed by family members.
The regional president of Galicia, Alfonso Rueda, pointed to the “very bad” weather conditions as one of the possible causes of the accident.