FED: 10th anniversary of Kempsey bus crash

AAP General News (Australia)
12-21-1999
FED: 10th anniversary of Kempsey bus crash

By Graeme Webber

SYDNEY, Dec 21 AAP - Ten years after the northern New South Wales town of Kempsey awoke
to the sound of screams and screeching metal, the community is still deeply scarred by
the double-coach crash that killed 35 people.

Three days before Christmas, a Sydney-bound McCafferty's bus with 34 passengers aboard
rounded the Clybucca Flat bend just north of the quiet township at 3.30am and collided
head-on with a TransCity coach carrying 38 travellers.

Six rows of seats on one of the buses was concertinaed into the space of one row as
the coaches ploughed into each other at 100kmh.

Passengers were hurled about the buses as seat mountings gave way and there were no
seatbelts to steady the human cargo.

Kempsey Mayor Peter Mainey [Mainey] said none of the victims were from his area but
many people from the community were still traumatised by the horror smash.

Councillor Mainey said one local person involved in the rescue operation could not
look at a Christmas tree because it reminded him of all the presents which were strewn
around the mangled wreckage at Kempsey on December 22, 1989.

"The whole area was in a state of shock for a long time and no doubt the emergency
service people that were involved in that experience are still being traumatised by it,"

Mr Mainey said.

"It's still pretty fresh in the minds of a lot of people and they will probably live
with it for the rest of their lives.

"It's something I often think about, I look out from where I live and quite often the
memories just flash through my mind."

Australian governments reacted to a public outcry over bus safety with a major spending
spree on the degraded Pacific Highway and a raft of reforms for bus operators.

The changes included stronger seat mountings, tachographs to monitor speed and rest
breaks, speed limiters which lock at 100km/h and all new long distance coaches put on
the road after July 1994 had to be fitted with seat belts.

"I was very critical at the time that coaches were not equipped with seat belts because
I believed they could have saved many lives in that incident," Cr Mainey said.

But four separate State and Federal Government transport authorities said today statistics
had not been kept on seatbelt installations.

And a statement issued by the Roads and Traffic Authority today said "there are no
plans at present to require seatbelts on local service buses".

AAP was referred to the Bus and Coach Association but NSW branch spokesman Roger Graham
also said no records were kept on the number of seatbelts fitted on the entire coach fleet.

He said most new coaches fitted with compulsory seatbelts were assigned to urban routes
but rural areas had fewer passengers and competitors and therefore more older buses without
seatbelts.

"I think the coach industry is still rather perturbed that while coach drivers have
monitoring devices that determine the hours they can drive, that isn't the situation for
the rest of the heavy vehicle industry," Mr Graham said.

"Coach travel is still the safest form of land transport, it's safer than rail and car."

NRMA crash reduction manager Nigel McDonald said the Pacific Highway was much safer
than 10 years ago when "it was probably the most notorious road in Australia".

AAP gmw/sb/bdm

KEYWORD: KEMPSEY

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