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A “duck boat” tour vehicle and a charter bus carrying foreign students to a college orientation event collided on a busy Seattle bridge, killing four people and sending dozens to hospitals.
The collision happened Thursday on the Aurora Bridge, which carries one of the city’s main north-south highways over a lake. At least eight people were in critical condition, and many others suffered lesser injuries.
There was no immediate word about the cause of the crash, which involved a military-style tour bus that can also be operated on water. Initial reports described the accident as a head-on collision.
“We didn’t see anything. Just the sound. The smell of gas,” said Xie Rujia, a 16-year-old from China, who was on the bus carrying about 45 North Seattle College students and staff. The group was headed to Safeco Field as part of new-student orientation programs.
She said glass fell on their faces, and some people jumped from the bus.

Xie held a bag of ice against some bruises on her face as she left the North Seattle College campus, where the less seriously injured people on the bus were taken.
A driver who was behind the duck boat said the tour bus and duck boat were headed in opposite directions. Brad Volm of Philadelphia said the amphibious vehicle swerved in front of him. The left front tire of the duck boat appeared to lock up, and the vehicle swerved into the oncoming charter bus, he said.
Witnesses described hearing a loud screech and then seeing injured people lying on the pavement or wandering around in a daze.
Nurse Jahna Dyer said she was walking across the bridge when she came upon the scene, a mess of jumbled metal and glass. Some victims were lying on the road. Others milled about, seemingly in shock and falling down.
Dyer jumped a railing separating the sidewalk from the roadway and helped stabilise an injured man’s neck. She said she also helped a woman who had a cut lip and glass in her eye.
“She was holding my hand and saying thank you,” she said.

The amphibious vehicle is operated by a tour company called Ride the Ducks, which offers tours that are known for exuberant drivers and guides who play loud music and quack through speakers as they lead tourists around the city.
Company President Brian Tracey said he did not know what happened. “Our main concern right now is with the families of those hurt and killed,” he said.
The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team to Seattle to investigate.
Because foreign students were on the charter bus, efforts were being made to contact consulates, Mayor Ed Murray said. He had no other details.
Kuen Shouh Wu says his 18-year-old daughter was on the charter bus, but was not hurt. He and his daughter, Ming Chao Wu, are from Taiwan, and he is a visiting scholar at the University of Washington. Wu said when he learned of the accident, he came to the school.
“I was scared,” he said. “I don’t know why it happened.”
The safety of the amphibious boats has been questioned before. Lawyer Steve Bulzomi represented a motorcyclist who was run over and dragged by a Ride the Ducks boat that came up behind him at a stoplight in downtown Seattle in 2011.
“These are military craft that were never designed to navigate narrow city streets,” Bulzomi said Thursday. “This is a business model that requires the driver to be a driver, tour guide and entertainer at the same time. It asks too much of the driver.”
In 2010, a tugboat-guided barge plowed into a duck boat packed with tourists that had stalled in the Delaware River in Philadelphia.
The crash sank the duck boat and sent all 37 people aboard into the river. Two Hungarian students — 16-year-old Dora Schwendtner and 20-year-old Szabolcs Prem — never resurfaced.


Foreign teens injured in horror crash in US: Four dead as Seattle tour ‘duck boat’ and college bus collide

A victim of the collision between a tour "duck" and a bus carrying foreign university students is stretchered away from the scene of Thursday's crash in Seattle. Photo: AFP 

An overhead view of the crash on Seattle's Aurora Bridge. Photo: AP

Victims of Thursday's collision are treated at a triage centre on the bridge before being taken to hospital. Photo: Tribune News Service

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