Nightmare scene for emergency services at Hunter Valley bus crash
Emergency services arrived in the darkness to an unimaginable scene. A 57-seat bus had rolled on its side on the edge of Wine Country Drive in the Hunter Valley.
Emergency services arrived in the darkness to an unimaginable scene. A 57-seat bus had rolled on its side on the edge of Wine Country Drive in the Hunter Valley.
Early responders, who got to the Hunter Expressway off-ramp near Greta about 11.30pm, smashed the front window, pulling out anyone they could. The few walking wounded emerged on their own.
Fire crews used airbags to lift the bus off the ground before stabilising it with pieces of timber propped underneath. They managed to free two people but it is unclear whether they were alive.
The horror could be heard in the voice of the first responder who called in the incident.
“Major incident declared. We have a bus rollover, multiple patients,” he says in the audio, his voice shaky. “We have police, fire brigade on scene. At this stage we have identified seven, I repeat seven, code fours”, referring to the visible fatalities.
“We have one red label patient whose injuries are severe and unfortunately we are expecting that is also going to code four (become fatal).
“We have multiple red (critical injuries) and orange (serious injuries) label patients at this stage.
“I need all resources allocated to continue, I am still trying to work out exactly how many patients we have here.”
Those crews, which included Hunter Valley Police District, Police Rescue, Traffic and Highway Patrol, NSW Ambulance paramedics, the NSW Fire and Rescue and NSW Rural Fire Service, would quickly discover nine people had died. All were guests from the same wedding.
They had just travelled 20 minutes from the Wandin Estate wedding venue where they had been dancing, drinking and celebrating the love of friends and family of married couple Mitchell Gaffney and Madeleine Edsell.
Another person would soon die in hospital. Some suffered amputations on the scene. In total, 25 were injured and sent to four hospitals – John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, Maitland Hospital, Calvary Mater Newcastle and Royal Prince Alfred in Sydney.
On Monday afternoon, some 16 hours later, rescue officers began the harrowing task of removing the deceased.
Rescue crews were sifting through the wreckage to match the belongings in the vehicle to the dead and injured, as the bus was righted from its side.
“You can just imagine what it was like,” emergency services representatives repeated time and again, struggling to lay out what had confronted them and colleagues. “Complex”, “awful” and “very difficult” were some of the words used to describe the devastation.
Acting Assistant Police Commissioner Tracy Chapman described the scene as “frantic”.
Police Minister Yasmin Catley said emergency services “were presented with something they would have never wanted to have seen”.
NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb said on Monday the process of accounting for everyone on board was “long and slow”.
Police at Cessnock station would field calls throughout the day from all over the country. The wedding guests included locals from Singleton, and people from Queensland and Victoria, where the couple’s lives had spread out.
“The most complex part of this job for police now is actually accounting for the victims and the passengers on this bus,” Commissioner Webb said.
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