NEW ORLEANS -- A chartered bus carrying members of a casino club on a Mother's Day gambling excursion flipped off a highway Sunday morning, killing 21 people, authorities said. Sixteen were hospitalized, some in critical condition.
Mayor Marc Morial, who said it was the worst traffic accident in city history, announced the number of victims and said no names would be made public until relatives were notified.The bodies were not all removed until the afternoon, four hours after the crash. "We have people on top of each other, crushed between twisted metal," police officer Joe Narcisse said.
The bus, traveling eastbound on Interstate 610, swerved from the left lane into the right lane, then crashed into an embankment at a tunnel for golf carts at the City Park course, police said.
It then came to rest on a grassy area along the highway, which passes through a residential section of the city.
Terrell Walker, safety director for Custom Bus Charters, which chartered the bus for the trip to Casino Magic in Bay St. Louis, Miss., said the driver told him the bus swerved when it was cut off by another car.
A witness told the same story. Linda Watkins said she was driving behind the bus when a white car swerved in front and the bus changed lanes. Then the white car swerved back in front of the bus, which ran off the road and crashed up the embankment.
"People started flying out of the bus, flying out the windows," she said.
Authorities said the accident happened shortly before 9 a.m. asthe bus was headed for a casino on Mississippi's Gulf Coast.
Walker said 46 people were on the bus, but the list of passengers was lost in the wreckage. Those aboard included members of an informal gambling club, many of them elderly, some in their 80s.
Four more people had been waiting to board the bus in New Orleans, including Charlene Schexnider, who has traveled with the group for years.
"I consider everybody on the bus my friend," she said.
The front of the bus was so crumpled that its front wheels were two feet off the ground. Rescue squads had to brace the bus with timbers and use ladders to reach its windows.
Eight people were taken to Medical Center of Louisiana, all in critical condition, a spokesman for the hospital said. "Two of them are in very critical condition," said spokesman Jerry Romig.
Others were taken to Tulane Medical Center, Methodist Hospital and Memorial Medical Center's Mercy campus, police said.
The people on the bus were members of a club who go to the casino twice a month, according to George Tassin, who said eight members of his family, mostly women on a Mother's Day trip, were on the bus.
Tassin's wife, daughter and an aunt were among the injured, he said as he waited outside the hospital where they were taken.
He said his aunt was making her first trip since the recent death of her husband.
"My aunt finally decided to go this one time and this happened," he said.
Four gambling charter buses crashed in New Jersey en route to Atlantic City in late December and early January. One crash on Christmas Eve killed eight people and injured 15 others.