One male passenger was instantly killed and a second person died from injures after the top of a motor coach bus entering Miami International Airport smashed into an overpass at the airport’s arrivals entrance Saturday morning.
Thirty others were transported by ambulance to the Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital. Four of those were in critical condition, including the second passenger who died.
The male driver of the bus, who has not been identified, was not injured and did not require medical treatment, said Lt. Arnold Piedrahita a Miami-Dade Fire Rescue spokesman.
The accident, which happened at about 8 a.m., brought traffic in and out of the airport to a halt and authorities scrambled to rescue passengers trapped inside the large white bus, which was carrying 32 people.
The identities of the two dead passengers were not immediately released but authorities removed the body of a male passenger at about 11 a.m. A white Miami-Dade County van arrived at the scene about 10 minutes later to pick up the body.
Three people placed the body in a clear plastic bag, as six police officers used yellow plastic to block the view from arriving travelers. Two men carried the body off the bus at 11:20 a.m.
Piedrahita said the male passenger who died was sitting near the front of the bus. He was dead when emergency personnel arrived. The gender of the second dead passenger was not immediately released.
The front of the bus was so badly damaged that emergency personnel could not get inside through the front door. Instead, they used a Jaws of Life to cut a hole on the side of the bus, toward the rear, to remove the victims, Piedrahita said.
Many of those who were hurt suffered "major injuries," said Greg Chin, an airport spokesman.
According to public records, the bus belongs to Miami Bus Service Corporation, a Miami company owned by Mayling and Alberto Hernandez.
Mayling Hernandez, reached on her cell phone shortly after noon Saturday, to comment.
"I'm too busy dealing with this to talk at the moment," she said at 12:25 p.m. "I don't have time to talk about this at the time."
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the company has two drivers for its three passenger motor coaches.
The company had no unsafe driving or controlled substances violations based on a 24-month record ending on Oct. 26, 2012.
However, the company scored a 92.2 percent in the fatigued driving category, which means it exceeded the federal safety threshold based on roadside data or it has been cited with one or more serious violations in the past year.
At MIA, about a dozen fire trucks and six ambulances blocked the airport entrance, and traffic entering the airport was delayed by about 30 to 40 minutes. Although no flights were affected or delayed, traffic was tied up. Only one lane on the lower level arrivals entrance remained open through mid-day.
The departures entrance, on the upper level, was not blocked, but there was a long delay for many getting to or leaving the airport.
Pedro Gomez, a taxi driver, was among those stuck in traffic.
"We have been waiting three hours waiting to leave," he said.
People arriving from their flights were peeking from their windows to get a view of the scene. On the first floor, in arrivals, the crashed white bus remained on site with the top missing over the driver’s seat. Shattered glass covered the floor.
The back side emergency door was missing and a bus chair lay on the ground, as well as luggage, which had been packed into the lower level of the bus.
A large yellow sign warns drivers that the vehicles exceeding 8'6" cannot pass through, said Piedrahita, the Miami-Dade Fire Rescue spokesman, adding that he did not know the height of the bus.
"You would think the driver should have know his bus was too high," Susan Lillis said, who flying in from Baltimore. "You would think he would have been here before."
Peter Beltre, a taxi driver, speculated that the bus driver miscalculated the height of the overpass in the arrivals area.
"I have seen buses that are too high have a section to drop people off," Beltre said. "There are yellow signs with warnings."
Hernan Garcia, who works at the airport, guiding cruise ship tourists to buses taking them to the Port of Miami, said: "It’s clear that the driver was not familiar with the airport. There are designated routes for these type of buses and it is prohibited to speed in this area."
Only taxi drivers were allowed in the arrivals lanes as of mid-morning. Traffic homicide detectives were still at the scene, measuring the area and collecting evidence.
Among some of the arriving tourists who spotted the crash scene was three-year-old Edwin Aparicio of Bogota, Colombia.
"Wow, like a can of sardines," he said in Spanish, referring to the top of the bus, which bended like an accordion as it hit the iron ceiling.
