A bus coming back from an excursion to Antigua, Guatemala, ran head-on into a tanker truck on Honduras’s CA-4 highway on Sunday, April 5. Eight people died and eight were injured. The tanker was carrying cyanide.
It happened around 5 p.m. in the community of La Ceibita, in Quimistán municipality, Santa Bárbara department, about 170 kilometers northwest of Tegucigalpa.
Darwin Hernández, head of the Traffic Accident Investigation Section, said all eight dead were Hondurans. Commissioner Lenin Andino, the country’s director of roads and transportation, told reporters that both drivers were among them, along with six bus passengers. Officials named the bus driver as Javier Deras and the truck driver as Ever Fajardo. Both died at the scene.
A hazardous load on a crowded road
Andino and Hernández both said the truck’s cargo was cyanide. Because of that, authorities cleared people who had gathered near the wreck and stopped traffic in both directions. Crews worked through Sunday night to pull the overturned tanker out of the way and to free passengers who remained trapped inside the bus.
Teams from the national port authority were brought in to deal with the cyanide container. Coordination with the Pan American Health Organization started right away, to manage any chemical risk. Traffic was sent onto secondary roads around La Ceibita while the wreckage was cleared, and investigators from the Traffic Accident Investigation Section stayed at the site that night to collect evidence.
The stretch of the CA-4 where the crash happened has been busy over the Easter holiday period. The bus was a tourist service carrying people home from the Guatemala trip.
Officials describe the collision as the latest in a series of serious accidents on the CA-4 corridor during high-travel periods. Authorities plan to release a preliminary investigation report on Monday morning in Quimistán.
