School Bus Crash in Western France Kills 6 Students

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/12/world/europe/france-school-bus-crash.html

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PARIS — Six students were killed in western France on Thursday morning when their school bus and a heavy truck collided, officials said.

The accident occurred at 7:15 a.m. in Rochefort, the police in the Charente-Maritime administrative department said in a statement. The town is close to the Atlantic Coast, near the Île de Ré and the Île d’Oléron, two popular resorts.

Seventeen people were involved in the accident, including 15 children and the drivers of the truck and the school bus, which was returning from the Île d’Oléron, the statement said. At least three people were hospitalized because of their injuries.

The junior minister for transportation, Alain Vidalies, told the news channel LCI that it appeared that the school bus had been hit by one of the truck’s sideboards — which are designed to keep loads in place but which could have become unfastened — as the two vehicles passed each other on the road. The accident occurred in an industrial area of the city’s port.

President François Hollande’s office issued a statement expressing “strong emotion” over the accident, and it said that Environment Minister Ségolène Royal and Education Minister Najat Vallaud-Belkacem were on their way to the scene. (Ms. Royal was formerly the president of the Poitou-Charentes administrative region, which includes Charente-Maritime. During that time, in 2007, she ran unsuccessfully as the Socialist Party’s candidate for the French presidency.)

The accident was the second in two days involving schoolchildren in France. Early Wednesday, two students, ages 12 and 15, were killed in an accident in the Doubs administrative department in eastern France, near the Swiss border, after a school bus driving in snowy weather veered off the road.

In October, a truck and a bus carrying elderly people on a sightseeing excursion collided in southwestern France, killing 43. It was the country’s worst traffic disaster in 33 years.