The Government of Chile has announced this Saturday that at least twelve people have died and another 15 have been injured in a serious road accident, after a bus collided head-on with a truck in the Valparaíso region, in the central area of the country.
The Government delegate, Soledad Loyola, has detailed that among the 15 injured is a person in critical condition and two minors.
"We have two minors, one who is eleven and the other who is three years old, who have some injuries," Loyola said, who has emphasized that all those who died were adults and that most of the injured have been transferred to the Hospital Claudio Vicuña of San Antonio.
For now, it is not ruled out that the death toll may increase, since the emergency teams continue working on removing the vehicles involved and recovering the bodies.
The accident occurred at around 9:00 a.m. (local time) on the well-known Ruta de la Fruta, which runs through the Valparaíso, Metropolitan de Santiago and Libertador Bernardo O'Higgins regions in Chile's Central Valley. According to the Government delegate, the impact between the bus and the truck was head-on and a car traveling behind would also have been affected.
According to the Prosecutor's Office, the only occupant who came out alive from that car will testify "in the capacity of a witness" before the authorities, once he has been discharged from the medical center.
The Police are preliminarily treating human error as the main cause of the crash, although the exact circumstances of the accident have not yet been clarified and possible responsibilities have not been determined.
Regarding the legal situation of the vehicles involved, the case prosecutor has stated that the truck had all documentation in order, while there are still no complete records about the technical inspection of the bus.
The mayor of Santo Domingo, Fernando Rodríguez, has explained to the media the particularities of this road, emphasizing that it is a heavily traveled route by cargo trucks and passenger buses that connect various towns with San Antonio, although he has insisted that the condition of the roadway would not have influenced the origin of the accident.
Rodríguez has stressed that, despite improvement works on the Ruta de la Fruta, the infrastructure continues to have problems absorbing the current flow of traffic, especially that of heavy vehicles.
"So that’s why, what I think is that new improvements have to come there," the mayor has stated in remarks collected by the newspaper 'La Tercera', calling for strengthening safety measures on the road. However, he has reiterated that "that has nothing to do with today’s accident".