Two dead, several injured after bus careens into a ravine
Armored Egged line travelling from Jerusalem to Ariel careens downhill in the area of Ma'ale Levona, trapping many passengers under its twisted metal; emergency teams forced to contend with rain, darkness and muddy conditions as they attempted to extricate the trapped and wounded passengers.
Two men were killed when an armored Egged bus flipped over Thursday night into a 300-meter-deep ravine near Ma'ale Levona in Binyamin.
One of the casualties was the bus driver, 37-year-old Avishai Kroani from Ariel. The second casualty was 23-year-old Ophir Rachmanov, an engineering student from Jerusalem's Ramot neighborhood. MDA teams treated 7 other injured passengers, among whom 3 were severely wounded, and many rescue teams are still working at the scene of the accident.
According to the National Road Safety Authority, 30 people were killed on the roads this month, marking an increase on last year's 23 in the same period.
MDA stated its paramedics, along with those IDF medical teams, were forced to treat the wounded in rough terrain and harsh conditions of darkness and pouring rain.
Helicopters and ambulances evacuated the wounded to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Tel Hashomer, Hasharon in Petah Tikva and Shaare Zedek Medical Center in Jerusalem.
IDF forces fired flares over the scene of the accident in order illuminate the area and help the rescue crews find other possibly wounded passengers.
Moshe Hershtik, Deputy Chief of the rescue squad of Megillot, who worked in tandem with other search and rescue crews, stated that "the scene is very complicated, and we are working with the Samaria Fire Department and Search and Rescue squad to move the bus."
The hefty weight of the armored bus made it more difficult for the rescue teams to flip it over and exricate the passengers.
MDA paramedic Haim Haimson described the serious accident: "It's a horrendous accident. Upon arrival to the scene, we saw that the separation fence between the road and the ravine was bust open and several hundred meters away, we saw the mangled and flipped upside down."
"We could hear cries for help coming from the direction of the bus. On the way over there, we ran into two wounded passengers who had been hurled out of the bus. We entered the bus through the rear window that had shattered and rescued the injured in order to provide medical treatment."
The MDA Jerusalem District Director, Shlomo Petrover, who directed the medical evacuation said that "the teams were spread out in the field in order to make sure no other injured passengers had been thrown out of the bus, and scanned the area along with a helicopter that was rushed to the site."
