BENTON, N.Y. — A car passing a slow-moving farm tractor on a curve sideswiped an oncoming van carrying 15 Mennonites through New York's rural Finger Lakes region Tuesday, sending the van under the tractor, killing five passengers and injuring eight others plus the driver of the tractor, police said.
Yates County Sheriff Ronald Spike said five people in the van were pronounced dead at the scene of the 12:40 p.m. crash and eight were taken to hospitals, some with "very serious" injuries. The tractor driver was also taken to a hospital. The car driver's condition was not known.
"In passing, (the car) glanced off the van and went off the highway and the van ended up going underneath the farm tractor," Spike said. The car tried to go around the tractor in a no-passing zone near where the 55-mph stretch of two-lane blacktop curves and signs recommend reducing speed to 45 mph.
"It's just a horrific tragedy," Spike said. "It really strained the EMS services and fire departments. There was a lot of hard work at the scene."
No names of the dead and injured were available Tuesday afternoon. "We have yet to identify a lot of the individuals," Spike said.
He said the Mennonites were all adults from Steuben County, south of the crash scene.
The tractor included a large spraying implement. At least four people were stuck in the wreckage before they were removed by emergency responders. Four hours after the crash, responders were still removing pieces of the van from under the tractor and loading it on a flatbed truck.
"It took a long time to get the individuals out because the van ended up entangled and underneath the large tractor with the spray equipment on it," Spike told The Associated Press.
"It's probably one of the worst accidents we've had in this county that I can remember," he said.
The crash happened 43 miles southeast of Rochester and about 30 miles northeast of the spot in Steuben County where a tour bus crashed Sunday on Interstate 390, killing two people and injuring 35. It's a mostly agricultural swath of land, and the road where Tuesday's accident happened carves its way between large soybean fields.
A dispatcher said four helicopters, several fire departments and about a dozen ambulances services were called to the scene.
Karin Christensen at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester said four of the injured are at the hospital and another was expected.
Tim Raths contributed to this report from Washington, D.C., and Mary Esch contributed from Albany.