As reported by Joynews just today, there has been a fatal accident at Sarekyekura, a farming community near Fufulso in the Savannah Region with eighteen people feared dead after two buses had a head-on collision.
According to the source, those who died included 12 males and 4 females including a child, with many others said to be in a critical condition after they sustained varying degrees of injuries.
According to the Savannah Regional Fire Commander, Kwasi Baffour-Awuah, a Yutong bus with registration number AC 1699-20 from Kumasi to Garu collided with another bus with registration number GN 3345-16 travelling from Zebila to Kumasi. He said the bus from Zebila veered off its lane into the other lane and collided head-on resulting the casualties.
The Savannah Regional Fire Commander said both drivers died on the spot with two other people dying at the health facility they were sent to. Meanwhile, 45 injured persons are currently receiving treatment at the Buipe Polyclinic and Holistic Medicare Hospital while all 16 bodies have been deposited at the Tamale Teaching Hospital.
The Regional Fire Service Commander is appealing to government for rescue equipment in the region.
Source: Myjoyonline.com
This is the first catastrophic accident with such a degree of multiple fatalities and personal injuries to begin 2021. Road traffic crashes are the real enemy here although COVID-19 lurks in the background and receives all the attention. Road traffic crashes are killing at scale, all because of the lack of adequate national and organizational arrangements for ensuring safe drivers, safe vehicles, and safe journeys.
Here are three importance questions we need to ask ourselves in every road transport safety discussion.
- How do we ensure that only safe drivers and vehicles are on our roads?
- How do we ensure that our roads are safe for users?
- How do we ensure that organizations and persons involved in road transport businesses exercise duty of care?
Ensuring good driver behaviors is the duty of organizations in the road transport business, the drivers themselves and the passengers who must intervene for their own safety. Drivers and road transport operators must be held accountable for the safety of their passengers with stringent penal actions for negligence.
Government must also ensure that our roads are safe through proper planning to design out all road safety hazards, ensure adequate maintenance and adequate road traffic and engineering controls to limit the road traffic violations such as over-speeding, wrongful overtaking and human errors with potential for crashes. We need oneway traffic systems on our highways to prevent head-on collisions, which have proven to be the major cause of multiple fatalities in road traffic crashes.
All road transport operators must be made to understand the importance of journey planning, the need to understand the nature of the roads they use and ensure that their drivers drive safely according to the roads and weather conditions and most importantly the need to allocate adequate time for their journeys and for rest stops. Road transport operators must be mandated by government to monitor drivers’ behaviors such as over-speeding, hash breaking, use of unapproved routes, among others, through In-vehicle Monitoring System (IVMS) and random alcohol tests. They must ensure that drivers are regularly trained and aware of their organizational arrangements for fatigue management, distracted driving, and driving under the influence of alcohol and the related penal actions.
This is a never ending battle that must be fought by the government, employers and individuals. It is high time, organizations and individuals who compromise on safety leading to deaths got sued for negligence and manslaughter.