Miracle among crash carnage

[caption id="attachment_98119" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Shoes and other personal items lie scattered around the scene of the horror accident near Willowvale at the weekend. Picture: Lulamile Feni.[/caption]

THREE battered young builders who survived the Willovale district bus crash that killed 36 people at the weekend believe God spared them. “It is only through God’s grace that we are alive,” father-of-three Mlulameli Nongwane said yesterday.

In a black weekend on the Eastern Cape’s roads, a further 10 people died on the R61 between Cradock and Graaff-Reinet when the taxi they were travelling in overturned at 5am after a tyre burst.

Both accidents happened on Saturday.

Premier Phumulo Masualle likened the bus and taxi crash deaths to the Marikana tragedy.

“It’s a weekend like no other weekend in the country. The last time there were so many dead people was in 2012,” he said.

Masualle said the loss of 46 lives was felt across the country.

Speaking from their hospital beds in Butterworth yesterday, Willowvale crash victims Nongwane, 36, Lunga Gogo, 30, and Mlungiseleli Nkuhlu, 27, recounted how they escaped the mangled wreck.

They had boarded the bus shortly after 6am in KwaSongwevu village and were returning home to Ciko.

The accident took place less than a kilometre from their homes.

The three friends were returning home from a building job in another village when the tragedy occurred.

Friend and co-worker Xolile Mngqetho, 36, died in the crash.

Nongwane, who sustained injuries to his chest, neck and face, said the bus was negotiating some curves on the gravel road in Nkelekethe when it started speeding up.

“People started standing up and when I saw that it was going out of control, I sat down in the passage and clutched onto my seat,” he said.

Gogo, a married father of two, grabbed the seat in front of him, while Nkuhlu joined Nongwane on the floor. There were loud screams and a huge thud as the bus hit an embankment before it flew into the air and nose-dived into the river.

Gogo said the faces of his two children flashed through his mind as the bus became airborne.

“Everything went blank. When I came around, I followed Nongwane out of the window,” he said.

Nkuhlu could not remember how he got out, but his friends said he crawled out.

They heard the screams of the dying bus driver under the bus, but could do nothing to save him.

They were also worried about Mngqetho, who had been at the front of the bus while they had been at the back.

Nongwane vowed he would never again take a bus.

Taxi driver Mzwabantu Sidelo, 29, lost his niece Endinako Mantanga, 3, in the crash and his mother, Ona, was critically injured and airlifted to hospital.

He said he had been riding behind the bus, which was taking shoppers and other commuters from five villages to Willowvale, when it suddenly veered off the road and “flew into a river”.

The bus, belonging to AB350, which has a contract with the provincial government on rural routes, was negotiating a winding slope.

 - Lulamile Feni and Sikho Ntshobane