The site of the tour bus accident on Sunday in the northeast corner of Oregon. Many of the passengers spoke only Korean.
Language barriers, steep slopes and ice all compounded the difficulty of the response to the Oregon bus crash that killed nine people and injured more than three dozen others on Sunday on a treacherous stretch of mountain highway in the state’s northeast corner, police authorities said on Monday.
But the biggest factor was simply the scale of the accident, they said, which drew emergency teams from 10 ambulance companies around the region.
The teams set up roadside triage and hauled wounded people on stretchers — many of whom spoke only Korean — up a steep slope down which the bus had rolled. Identification and notification of families has been slow, the authorities said, as when the bus rolled, personal effects were tossed and many of the victims were ejected or partially ejected. They said a majority of passengers were Korean, but living in many different places and ranged in age from about 7 to about 74..
The bus, operated by a tour company in Vancouver, British Columbia, identified by the state police as Mi Joo Tour & Travel, was returning to Vancouver from Las Vegas when the accident occurred about 10 a.m. Sunday, police said.
The site of the accident, a section of Interstate 84 about three and a half hours east of Portland, already had a bloody history. Deadman Pass, near the site, was named for a killing during the years of white-Indian conflict in the 1800s. The descent from the pass, along the old Oregon Trail that once led white settlers toward the fertile valleys east of the Cascades, became legendary then as a place of rough and dangerous final passage through the Blue Mountains. The highway that later overlapped the trail remains treacherous, especially in winter, travel Web sites advise.
Two survivors of the crash told The East Oregonian and The Oregonian newspapers that some people on the bus feared it was going too fast in heading down the mountain. But other passengers were asleep, the witnesses said, when the bus went through the guardrail and down.
Police authorities said in a news conference in Pendleton that the bus was not required to have seat belts and that only the driver, who was severely injured, was wearing one. They said the investigation, including the question of the bus’s speed, could take weeks.
A spokesman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Sgt. Peter Thiessen, said the agency was helping United States authorities notify next of kin in Canada, but declined to identify nationalities of the victims. There was no answer at the telephone number listed for the tour company in Vancouver.
