Ride along Onondaga Lake Parkway ended with blood and broken glass when double-decker bus hit low bridge.
Investigators examine the driverâs compartment at the scene of the fatal Megabus accident Sept. 11 after the bus was pulled upright. The bus hit the Onondaga Lake Parkway railroad bridge at about 2:30 a.m. and rolled onto its side. Syracuse, NY -- Vicky Reed flew off her seat at 2:30 a.m. when a double-decker Megabus crashed into a low bridge and toppled on its side.
Reed, 71, slid down the aisle, bumping into rails along the way. Her husband, across from her, bounced off a table that broke away. He didn’t move.
Reed called his name. “Ray!” No answer. She found her shoes, which she’d taken off to sleep.
Ray Reed, 72, a retired high school English teacher, came to. His back ached badly. His bare feet reached for the floor, and it was gone.
The Reeds were among 25 survivors Sept. 11 when the Philadelphia-to-Toronto bus hit the CSX bridge on Onondaga Lake Parkway. Four people died; all are believed to have been in the front of the upper deck. More were injured.
The bus wedged under the bridge, leaning about 80 degrees to the side against an abutment.
At the front of the bus, the driver emerged from the dust and debris. First his hand appeared, then his arm and finally his face, covered in blood. The driver, John Tomaszewski, 59, of Yardville, N.J., said he had hit his head.
“What happened?” he repeated. “Where are we?”
Jeremiah Couey, 32, an engineering student seated behind the Reeds on the first level, quickly collected his senses. The bus was quiet. Couey found his glasses and his backpack. Then he looked for someone to help.
Lee Veeraraghavan, of Toronto, Canada, slept in the lower-deck's last row. She was thrown near a broken window and stuck under someone's leg. Someone freed her and she called 911 -- but didn't know where they were. She landed at a broken window. Someone was on top of her. The broken glass felt like pebbles beneath her. People lay outside, under the bus. They weren’t moving.
People screamed. Others prayed out loud. A frantic man, hanging from the upper deck, called for help.
Couey saw Veeraraghavan stuck under another woman’s legs. But first, he needed some shoes. He found someone’s black sneakers in the rubble and put them on.
He helped free Veeraraghavan, who called 911. The operator asked, Where are you? She had no answer.
Amid the chaos and concussions, passengers lost all orientation. Up and down were twisted. A single street light was the only illumination. Blood was everywhere, but whose? The force separated them from their glasses, their phones, their shoes and their loved ones. Where were they?
Screaming for help
Upstairs, Reena Rai, a researcher from the University of Pennsylvania, was thrown off her seat, three rows from the back. It was dark everywhere.
She struggled to breathe. She screamed for help. A woman was on top of her, and blood was dripping onto her face. She shook the woman: “Wake up!”
At first, no response. They were trapped under a seat.
Rai speed-dialed her husband, Amitabh, who was en route to Niagara Falls. He told her to call 911.
Behind them, Sarah Haney, 24, of Philadelphia, fell as the bus toppled over. She couldn’t find her glasses. She called out to her roommate, Laura Treadway, 24, and made sure she was OK. She saw Rai and the other woman stuck under the seat and pulled them free.
They all walked along the shattered windows to a hole and escaped.
Outside, the man hanging upside down from the deck was bleeding profusely. He begged for help: “Why God? Why me? Why now?”
Rai tried walking toward him. She wanted to give him a cell phone to call a loved one, just in case. But she became dizzy and laid down on the pavement. Her husband called back. Rai told him not to come because it was so late at night. She told him the driver must have fallen asleep.
Vaibhav Kothari, 21, an exchange student from Singapore, was thrown across the aisle and back again. His leg got stuck between two seats, about four rows from the back of the upper deck.
He looked out a broken window and saw pavement. He pulled his legs free. In the dark, he could see only the bloodied face of a man looking for his luggage.
Kothari worried the bus would catch fire. Kicking the shattered window to open a bigger hole, he climbed out and dropped a short distance to the ground. Others in the upper deck followed.
Help arrives
On the lower deck, firefighters directed passengers over broken windows. Step on the frames, they were told.
Reaching the hole that rescuers had opened, Veeraraghavan saw a body and tried not to look at it. Blood covered her hooded sweatshirt. A cut on her eyelid blurred her vision.
Outside, paramedics bandaged her eye. They checked her for spinal injuries. They did that for everyone who got out.
Nearly all were rescued within 20 minutes. The last ambulance left about 40 minutes after the crash, said Liverpool Deputy Chief Jason Ormsby, who organized the rescue.
The response was orderly, efficient and compassionate.
“Everything in Syracuse was so fantastic,” Veeraraghavan said. “I’ve never seen ... professionals and volunteers doing such good work under duress.”
Others agreed.
“The system was so organized and focused, there was no time to be frightened or scared,” Ray Reed said.
About 30 departments — fire companies, sheriff’s office and 18 ambulances — responded; there were 30 to 40 firefighters at the scene. They shored up the bus with wood, called box cribbing. About eight entered the bus and used cutters and other equipment to free passengers.
The man hanging from the upper deck was badly injured but survived,
authorities said.
The four who died were former Camillus resident Deanna Armstrong, 18, of New Jersey; Kevin Coffey, 19, of Kansas; Ashwani Mehta, 34, of India; and Benjamin Okorie, 35, of Malaysia.
Another four people remained in hospitals the night after the crash.
More than half the surviving passengers needed firefighters’ help to escape, Ormsby said.
A tearful call home
Haney, one of the two roommates from Philadelphia, realized how serious the crash was when she saw only a handful of passengers outside the bus. She is certified in CPR and first aid, and she helped paramedics treat a woman in shock, who was shaking.
When Haney’s roommate got outside, it all sunk in, and Treadway started crying. She called her parents. Her mother cried, too.
Couey, the engineering student, saw Ray Reed was still shoeless.
Megabus passenger Branislav Nikolic, of Toronto, Canada.“Here, sir, you take these shoes,” Couey said.
Couey rode with Vicky and Ray Reed in the last ambulance to Upstate University Hospital. There, a large room had been set up for the injured. Someone offered people a telephone to contact a loved one. A police officer took statements from passengers.
Someone gave Haney a purple jacket to replace her blood-stained red-and-white striped one.
The Red Cross set up a reception center for passengers at the Crowne Plaza. About 21 people — including four nurses, mental health workers, Red Cross employees and volunteers — staffed it.
“It was extremely well-organized,” said Branislav Nikolic, 25. “I felt like there was somebody who actually cared about what happened. That meant a lot at the time.”
A vice president of the Megabus company gave his personal credit card to Red Cross officials and told them to buy any prescriptions the passengers needed.
Three passengers lost their glasses. Megabus arranged for new ones within hours. A breakfast buffet appeared. A company official arranged rides home for the passengers, some of whom were traveling to Toronto on promotional rates as low as $1.50. They could take another bus, fly or take a taxi. A Toronto airport shuttle picked up the Reeds in Syracuse.
Photo of Onondaga Lake Parkway bus crash, taken by passenger Laura Treadway. Life-or-death decisions
The passengers were left to consider how fate decided who lived and died.
Veeraraghavan recalled a conversation she had with Benjamin Okorie, a Malaysian minister who died in the crash. They were waiting for the bus when two people walked by talking about their terrible trip.
Veeraraghavan, who has ridden the bus about 20 times from her work in Philadelphia back to her home in Toronto, told the minister that the buses weren’t that bad.
Okorie told her how luxury buses in Malaysia had massage units. He looked up at the front of the upper deck, she recalled, and said, “I want to sit right up there.”
Veeraraghavan wasn’t so sure. She thought: What if the bus tipped over?
The roommates, Haney and Treadway, wanted to sit in the front of the upper deck, just for the novelty and the view. But the roommates first went to the wrong bus stop and were last in line to board. The front seats upstairs were taken.
Waiting in Philadelphia, Nikolic struck up a conversation with Ashwani Mehta, a software engineer from India. Nikolic studies computational math at York University, in Toronto. First to the bus stop, they had their pick of seats.
But Nikolic’s wife, Masa, did not want to sit up front. And there wasn’t enough legroom, so he decided to sit near the staircase in the center. Mehta took a seat near the front, which doomed him.
“For me, it was just a matter of pure luck,” Nikolic said. “Something else showed me not to sit there.”
Contact Douglass Dowty at ddowty@syracuse.com or 470-6070.