3 Dead, 19 Injured After a Calgary Transit Bus Turns a Busy Street Into an Inferno

Some Thursday afternoons in Calgary are the forgettable kind. This one, nobody in Saddle Ridge will ever forget.

Just after 1:10 p.m. on October 15, a Calgary Transit bus moving north on Saddletowne Circle in the city's northeast slammed into a white car. That was only the beginning. The impact shoved the white car into a black car and a cube van — and the bus kept going. It plowed through the intersection and broadsided a second Calgary Transit bus sitting at a bus stop.

The parked bus was carrying 13 passengers. And it ran on natural gas. Within moments its entire roof was a wall of flame, thick black smoke climbing into the afternoon sky while phones came out all down the block.

Three people are dead. Nineteen more are hurt. And the veteran officer running the scene says he has never seen anything like it.

How eight vehicles became one fireball

Police pieced together the sequence like a horror film in slow motion. First bus hits white car; white car hits black car and van. First bus keeps rolling, clips the second bus at the stop with enough force to shove it clean across the road into three more vehicles. Eight vehicles, two of them city buses, tangled across a busy intersection in the middle of the lunch rush.

Then the fire started. The second bus was powered by natural gas, and investigators believe the fuel system fed the blaze that swallowed the roof. A bystander ran up to help and was knocked back by an explosion — he escaped with minor injuries. Fire crews arrived to find a burning bus, a trapped driver, and debris scattered across the pavement.

All three people killed were aboard that burning bus, police confirmed. Of the 19 injured, ten went to hospital by ambulance — one in life-threatening condition. Five more of the walking wounded were ferried to hospital on a city bus. A Calgary police officer was also hurt after running toward the flames just as they erupted. The trapped driver had to be cut out of the wreck by firefighters and was left with serious injuries.

"The biggest scene I've worked on"

Staff Sgt. Andy Woodward has been a Calgary police officer for 36 years. Standing in front of the cameras at the cordon, he did not hide how this one hit him.

"I've been a police officer for 36 years and I think this is probably the biggest scene I've worked on in relation to the collision we've got here," he said. The reconstruction team was still on site hours later, trying to answer the question everyone keeps asking: how does one bus turn into all of this?

Mike Mahar, president of the transit union local that represents Calgary's bus operators, said his members were shaken. "We're very concerned for our operators and the families affected by this," he told reporters. Calgary Fire Chief Steve Dongworth confirmed the trapped operator's injuries were serious, though the driver's condition was not released.

Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas promised a full investigation. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith posted condolences online: "My sincere thoughts are with the families of those who died and with everyone injured."

The natural gas question

Here's the part investigators will be chewing on for weeks. The bus that burned was fuelled by natural gas — cleaner than diesel, but unforgiving in a crash. Calgary Transit has been adding gas-powered buses to its fleet for years. Whether the fuel system ruptured on impact, and whether anything could have contained it, will almost certainly be central to the formal investigation.

For now, the official line is that reconstruction specialists are still piecing the scene together. Nobody has said the word "fault" yet. But three families are planning funerals, a driver is in hospital, and a whole neighbourhood watched a routine commute turn into a fireball on a Thursday afternoon.

Saddle Ridge will remember this one. So will Calgary Transit.

Photo: TagaSanPedroAko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (file photo: Calgary Transit bus, 2019).

Sources

• 1News (AP) — Three dead, 19 injured in Canada bus crash
• People — 3 Dead, 19 Injured After Bus Smashes into Multiple Vehicles and Causes Explosion
• Canadian Occupational Safety (via The Canadian Press, CBC, Global News) — Transit operator trapped, officer hurt as CNG bus burns in fatal Calgary crash