Bus accident with one dead and 42 injured: man convicted in Carinthia

The Ukrainian was accused of starting the journey very tired and of falling asleep at the wheel. The judgment is already legally binding.

The accident occurred last September on the B317 in the St. Veit district. The 27-year-old was extremely tired, said prosecutor Lisa Kuschinsky in her indictment. At 4:39 a.m. the man finally left the road with the fully occupied bus. An automatically recorded video from the bus’s so-called dashcam was shown at the hearing: It shows the bus driving straight ahead without braking in a slight left curve. Another video shows the man trying to turn the steering wheel at the last moment.

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“The defendant crossed the guideline several times before the accident. He was repeatedly traveling in the oncoming lane for several seconds and only had his eyes half open,” said the public prosecutor. The bus eventually crashed head-on into a concrete barrier.

“Didn’t feel tired”

The 27-year-old said he couldn’t explain how the accident happened: “I didn’t feel tired.” He was traveling on the Prague-Trieste line for the third night in a row. The roster at the time stipulated that the drivers worked six days in a row – sometimes at night – and then had three days off.

A driver who was driving behind the bus before the accident was interviewed as a witness. “I had actually already started to overtake, but I saw that the bus was snaking, so I didn’t do it,” said the witness. A few minutes later the bus hadn’t taken a curve: “Then all I saw were flying sparks.” The second bus driver, with whom the defendant took turns, said that he did not notice anything unusual about his colleague on the day of the accident. Each driver drove the bus for a maximum of two hours and 20 minutes at a time.

Expert: The cause of the accident was clearly fatigue

The expert interviewed in the trial testified that the accident was clearly due to the driver’s fatigue: “Right from the start of the journey, the driver was very swaying and cutting curves.” As the journey progressed, he took increasingly stronger actions to “decompensate” for his tiredness, such as looking left or right, eating or drinking, she said, referring to the video recordings from the bus.

Judge Michaela Sanin clearly saw grossly negligent homicide and multiple negligent bodily harm: “If you take on such an activity, are so tired and don’t stop for a moment or change the driver, you are assuming gross negligence.” The 27-year-old accepted the verdict, and prosecutor Kuschinsky declared that he would waive his right to appeal.