Bolt bus explodes on the Mass Pike eastbound in the West Newton section of Newton #wcvb pic.twitter.com/oRXWcRjgZG
— russnelligan (@russnelligan) May 11, 2015
And you thought you were safe off Fung Wah.
Passengers who thought they were safe from explosions on Bolt Buses, beware: A bus caught fire on the Massachusetts Turnpike in West Newton on Monday afternoon. Miraculously, no one has been hurt, reports WCVB. Massachusetts State Police closed part of the highway at first so crews could fight the fire, but then closed off the entire highway shortly thereafter. Police have since re-opened the left lane after extinguishing the flames, but traffic is supposed to be very heavy, leading to delays on the westbound side of the Mass Pike. Tuesday, 6:30 am update.
State police and Greyhound confirmed there were no injuries.
Ashley Sears, a spokesperson for Greyhound Lines, Inc. which owns the Bolt line, said,“Once the driver noticed smoke, the driver pulled over, evacuated the bus and called local authorities.” “All 47 customers that were onboard are unharmed and were able to retrieve all their belongings,” she added, according to The Herald. The Monday, 5 p.m. trouble was foreshadowed two hours before the explosion when the bus made a pit stop in Connecticut, reports CBS.
“So we stopped at a rest stop. Everyone got off the bus and supposedly a mechanic was working on it. We were there for two hours,” saidJake Freeman, aHarvard student and Dix Hills, Long Island resident. While traveling on I-95 in Conn., the driver announced that the bus was overheating.Freeman said. The driver, Nora Pacheco, was then given the green light to resume the trip.
“Supposedly someone said that a car came in front of us and, like, started waving our bus driver to the side, so we pulled over and she was screaming: ‘You’re on fire! You’re on fire!” Freeman said. “So this was coming from the back of the bus, and I was actually one of the people in the way back, so right from there, we looked back, and you could see flames coming out from the sides of the windows in the back of the bus, so right from there, there was a little bit of a panic.” The same bus had broken down before, BoltBus says, but mechanics for the company had cleared it then, too.
