Peru struggles to get deadly buses off roads

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, April 2, 2006

LIMA, Peru – Brandon Russell remembers the sound of screeching tires and passengers’ screams as their double-decker bus hurtled off a 60-foot cliff in Peru’s high southern Andes.

“We went through the guard rail. Everybody up top was screaming,” the 14-year-old said from his home in Vancouver, Wash. It felt like a roller coaster “where you go down and it just feels like your tummy tickles.”

“I had no idea what was going on until we impacted,” he said.

Surgeons removed the teenager’s spleen and repaired his perforated stomach and punctured lung after the August 2004 crash on a narrow, winding highway between Cuzco and Lake Titicaca. His mother is still undergoing operations to repair more than a dozen broken bones.

Her other son, Alex, 17, helped pull them from the wreckage.

The makeshift vehicle, one of hundreds of buses in Peru illegally grafted onto the chassis of flatbed trucks, went into a skid after the driver missed the turn onto a bridge and crashed into a dry riverbed. The driver and seven others were killed.

A legal and political battle now rages over efforts to get the deadly vehicles off Peru’s roads.

The perils of South American bus travel were highlighted March 22 when 12 elderly American tourists died in a crash on a mountain road in northern Chile. The bus was unregistered and not allowed to carry passengers.

The wreck occurred near the border with Bolivia, notorious for its 40-mile “Highway of Death” that drops some 12,000 feet from a snowcapped mountain into a steaming jungle. Hundreds of bus passengers and others have died along the route.

The toll keeps rising throughout the Andes. In Ecuador, a passenger bus tumbled 1,000 feet off a jungle mountain road March 24, killing 17 passengers and injuring 16. Colombia reported 513 deaths and 2,782 injuries in 2004 from accidents involving long-distance buses.

But Peru is perhaps the most notorious for the frequency of plunges and collisions on mountain roads. Peru’s Center for Investigation of Overland Transport, a monitoring group, counted 557 killed and 2,581 injured in long-distance bus accidents between July 2004 and June 2005.

Driver recklessness is a large part of the problem.

“The first 20 minutes of the trip, we’re flying down a dirt road going about 75 or 80 mph,” Brandon Russell’s brother Alex said.

Peru’s estimated 400 “bus-trucks” appear new but are structurally unsound and account for a third of fatalities, said Lino de la Barrera, vice president of the investigation center.

They have inadequate brakes and are four times more likely to cause deaths than Peru’s normal buses, which tend to be 10 to 15 years old and run-down, he said.

“The issue is strictly economic. To buy an old truck chassis and build this bus can cost you $35,000 to $50,000,” de la Barrera said. A new bus costs $250,000.

Peru outlawed bus-trucks in 2002, but companies used a loophole to keep them going.

A crackdown announced in February grounded more than a dozen illegal buses, and a court struck down a challenge from the operators, citing public safety.

But bus-truck owners persuaded a congressional commission to debate proposals that would legalize refurbished bus-trucks for up to 15 more years.