Greyhound bus crash prompts investigation into Bruce Highway conditions | ABC News

imagine as a community leader that kind of phone call when you discover that there's been a crash of this significance is something you just don't want to hear oh look terrible terrible uh incident and of course not only have we seen the loss of lives but also the impact on the emergency responders those people who are first on the scene it it is some distance from the closest uh ambulance station 20 km south of Home Hill so would have taken some time for those responders to actually arrive at the scene and you can only imagine uh what was unfolding when they arrived at that particular scene with you know multiple fatalities lots of people injured the bus over the railway tracks it would have been a very confronting scene yes so the bus ended up off the highway some distance off the highway onto these railway tracks and that's why queens and rail has suggested that services are going to be affected today what else has struck you about what occurred over the last 24 hours cuz I know it is a busy stretch of the the main road the Bruce Highway oh look lot of traffic lot of holiday traffic of course with school holidays on in queensday at the moment and of course we've got the show circuit in Townsville at the moment the Townsville shows on so a lot of people were traveling up to the show as well uh you don't think uh when you're getting on a bus or you're putting your loved ones on a bus that they're going to be involved in an incident of this magnitude and and I guess that's what's really hit home is that something like this could actually occur and it's uh it's the it's the emergency responders it's their worst nightmare to get that call to say that there's been a a serious traffic incident involving a Bus full of people is is really nightmare stuff Dale do we know where the three who passed away up from no we don't yet it's early early days as you can appreciate uh they could be from anywhere in Australia a lot of Backpackers traveling north at the moment for the fruit picking season the Horticultural season up here firing up at the moment so a lot of Backpackers uh traveling by coaches as well so early days and of course early days in terms of the investigation and uh and what actually caused this incident to occur uh the mayor of wit Sunday's Ry Collins told us earlier we saw a little bit of that clip in Laura's chat that it's a challenging stretch of road is that how you'd describe it I describing in probably more colorful terms than that but uh it is long overdue for a major upgrade and we're not just talking that particular section the entire length of the Bruce highway is in serious need of a massive injection of funds and that one meter wide median strip as I said yesterday needs to go from cans to Pine rivers near Brisbane it uh that's an imperative and uh it's reinforces just how important that highway is it is the major artery on the east coast of Queensland and uh and and the traffic volumes as we know from the traffic counts are going up year on year and uh and of course that's not being matched by funding to upgrade and maintain the highway uh that particular section is breaking up it's full of pools uh it's not a it's not a very safe section of Highway at all well feel free to use a bit more color with your language what do you mean breaking up oh look I the amount of money that's been allocated to fix the Bruce Highway uh this year in both the state and federal budget it wouldn't fix the pool I mean let's be serious we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars if not even billions of dollars that are required to upgrade that Highway uh it is nothing more than a goat track that's what the locals call it's the Bruce Highway goat track and uh and at times that's that's an app name particularly in wet weather when it starts to break up and uh it certainly needs some serious attention

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