March 28: 10 years since the accident between a minibus and a truck that killed 16 people in Manaus | Amazon

Among the dead were the drivers of the two vehicles, a child and a pregnant woman. Doctors delivered the baby, but he didn’t survive either.

In AM, accident between minibus and truck kills more than ten people

It was a Friday, around 7:40 pm, peak time on Djalma Batista Avenue, which is known for its long traffic jams, a truck, which provided outsourced services for the Municipal Infrastructure Secretariat (Seminf), collided head-on with a micro- bus on line 825.

According to the police and witnesses, the truck was traveling in the center direction, when it lost control, crossed the curb and went the wrong way, colliding head-on with the Executive.

Witnesses also said that the minibus was crowded and many passengers were standing inside the vehicle.

“I saw an S-10 [picape] coming at high speed. The driver of the S-10, who was behind the dumpster [caminhão], managed to get past it. He said the driver of the dumpster was speeding as if he had been unable to brake. He was going 100 km per hour. A passenger [do micro-ônibus] He came out of the window and I came to help, I put him on the sidewalk”, said electrician Pablo Pessoa, at the time.

With the accident, traffic, which was already chaotic on that fateful night, ended up getting even worse and even rescue teams found it difficult to reach the scene to help the victims. This is what retired rescuer Hely Parmelo, who helped with the accident, remembers.

“We don’t even know how we got there. I remember I was driving the ambulance and passed through a very narrow street in Parque 10, which had nowhere else to go, and there were cars on one side and the other, so much so that he left scratching the rear view mirror. But it was all about getting to the place as quickly as possible to try to save those people”, he said.

The man emotionally remembers the rescue of the victims. “They were victims trapped in wreckage and in this case I was only thinking about them. It could have been a relative of mine, a son, someone in the family. My thoughts were with them,” he said.

“It was a fatality. My son doesn’t work in this area, he wasn’t hired by the company. He worked odd jobs and drove from time to time. I found out from family friends that they were inside the minibus. They managed to survive and called me to tell me about the accident”, said the father.

The document also ruled out mechanical failures in the vehicle and concluded that the driver was reckless in ingesting narcotic substances. Still according to experts, The truck’s speed was between 80 and 90 km/h, above the permitted speed for the road, which is 60 km/h.

Data from the official report from the Institute of Expertise of the Civil Police of Amazonas, released in April of that year, also indicated that the high speed of the truck was the determining cause of the accident. The document says that the driver reached a speed above the limit established by the legislation of the National Traffic Council (Contran).

According to Seminf, the guardrails installed at the site are similar to the structure used on Formula 1 racing tracks. In both sections, 125 meters of the iron structure were used to prevent vehicles from overtaking the oncoming lane in cases of accidents. .

One year after tragedy, victims remember accident that killed 15 people in Manaus

Two years ago, an accident between a minibus and a dumpster killed 16 people in Manaus

Service honors and remembers 15 people killed in a tragic accident a year ago in Manaus