As Richard Robles climbed out of the wreckage of the tour bus on Friday afternoon and into the sunlight above, the scene around him snapped suddenly into view.
The long white bus, which had been cruising along the New York Thruway just minutes before — winding its way to New York City from Niagara Falls, N.Y. — lay busted on its side on a grassy embankment about 30 miles east of Buffalo. Beneath it, passengers were pinned, sandwiched between the heavy machinery and the hard ground below.
Outside the bus, a woman looked on, one half of her face severely scraped. There was a person with cuts running up the length of an arm. Another person with an injured leg. Cries for help rose from the vehicle, puncturing the air.
“My mind-set was to get off the bus,” Mr. Robles said on Saturday, sitting at a table in the lobby of a small Marriott hotel in Amherst, N.Y., about 25 miles from the scene of the crash. There was “so much blood. So much wounds.”
Mr. Robles, 38, who is from the Philippines but lives in Qatar, was one of 54 passengers traveling on the tour bus when it crashed and flipped over near Pembroke, N.Y., killing five people and injuring many others.
On Saturday, the New York State Police released the names of the five passengers who had been killed. They ranged in age from 22 to 65, including a person from Madhubani, India, three people from New Jersey and a Chinese student at Columbia University.
The people who died were Shankar Kumar Jha, 65, of Madhubani, India; Pinki Changrani, 60, of East Brunswick, N.J.; Zhang Xiaolan, 55, and Jian Mingli, 56, of Jersey City, N.J.; and Xie Hongzhuo, 22, of Beijing.
The bus appeared to drive into the median, correct course and then overturn at around 12:30 p.m. on Friday, rolling into the embankment on the side of the road, according to the authorities.
The Erie County Medical Center in Buffalo received 21 patients from the crash. Eleven of them remained at the hospital in stable condition on Saturday, including five in the trauma intensive care unit.
Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, N.Y., received six people from the crash. Two were treated for critical injuries, and three remained in stable condition on Saturday. One of the patients was treated and discharged.
Two patients were taken to Rochester Regional Health, where they were treated and then released on Friday, a spokesman said. Oishei Children’s Hospital in Buffalo received three patients from the crash. One remained in serious condition on Saturday evening, and the other two were discharged, a spokeswoman said. Buffalo General Medical Center treated four adults, and Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital received 11 adults and two children. By Saturday evening all the patients had left both hospitals.
The authorities were investigating the cause of the crash. Maj. Andre J. Ray of the State Police said at a news conference on Friday that the accident did not appear to involve a mechanical failure or impairment of the driver. Investigators believe the driver, identified as Bin Shao, 55, of Flushing, Queens, became distracted and lost control of the vehicle, Major Ray said.
At a news conference on Saturday, Thomas B. Chapman of the National Transportation Safety Board said the agency would be looking into all possible causes of the accident.
The bus was equipped with an event data recorder, Mr. Chapman said, which investigators will use to try to determine the vehicle’s speed and whether the driver pressed the gas or accelerator pedals at the time of the crash.
“It’s too early” to rule out any possible causes, Mr. Chapman said. The agency’s preliminary report on the accident will be published in about 30 days, he said.
After the crash, Mr. Robles said he was taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation. He had sustained only a minor injury and was released from the hospital on Friday night. A friend he was traveling with was released on Saturday morning with a head injury.
Others had even closer calls.
One woman, a graduate student in New York City, said she had been trapped underneath the bus for an hour, unable to move, as she waited for emergency medical workers to drag her from the wreckage.
The student, who asked to be identified only by her English first name, Aria, to avoid worrying her parents, who live in China, said she had moved to the city just a few weeks ago for a master’s program that starts later this month.
She had time for a short vacation before her orientation would begin on Monday, and after shopping around briefly for a place to go, she booked herself a seat on the tour bus. She wanted to see the rushing water of Niagara Falls. It was a way to see her new home state.
On Friday afternoon, she was nestled in a seat in the last row of the tour bus, cruising home, when she noticed the vehicle had started to drift.
What followed lasted only a few seconds: Screams of panic rang out. The driver lost control. She closed her eyes, hoping any breaking glass from the bus would not blind her, and braced for impact.
When she opened them again, she found herself buried under the heavy white vehicle. She called for help.
“I was totally buried under the whole car,” Aria said on Saturday, sitting in the Marriott lobby with two white bandages wrapped around her wrists and a patchwork of cuts and scrapes across her face. “They had so many people, volunteers and 911 police — together they helped to dig me out.”
When she was free, emergency workers whisked her into a car, and then in a helicopter to an emergency room. Hospital staff members cleaned her wounds and stitched her up before discharging her on Friday night.
“When I was buried, I think I was very calm because I wanted to rescue myself,” she said. “That was my priority at that time.” But the weight, and the loss, of the past 24 hours have only now just begun to sink in, she said.
The bus operator, identified by the authorities as M&Y Tour Inc., based on Staten Island, has a somewhat better safety record than many of its peers in the industry, according to the U.S. Transportation Department.
In the two years before the day of the crash, the department inspected the company’s buses 43 times. On nine occasions it found violations serious enough for the bus to be temporarily removed from service, according to government records, representing a failure rate of 21 percent. The industry average is 22.2 percent, according to the Transportation Department.
Inspectors also tested M&Y drivers 60 times during the same period, determining on one occasion that a driver needed to be removed from service — a failure rate of 1.7 percent. Over the last two years, the failure rate among bus drivers nationally was 6.6 percent, the department found.
Though the bus appeared to have been equipped with seatbelts, according to Mr. Chapman, many passengers were most likely not wearing them at the time of the accident, the State Police said.
A new state law requires charter bus passengers in New York above the age of 8 to wear seatbelts. If a police officer finds passengers not wearing belts, a violation and a $50 fine can be issued. The law does not require bus drivers to notify riders that seatbelts are required or to check whether passengers have buckled up.
The question of whether states or the federal government should enact tougher seatbelt laws for charter buses emerges after every bus crash with multiple fatalities, said Cathy Chase, president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, which pushes for such laws. Then the issue seems to fade from public discussion until the next big crash, she said.
“It’s like ‘Groundhog Day,’” Ms. Chase said. “Seatbelts are the first line of defense. Every passenger needs to buckle up on every ride, in every vehicle.”
On Saturday afternoon, a handful of crash survivors floated around the lobby of the Amherst Marriott, where some had stayed the night. They sat together, one with a black eye, others with casts or bandages, talking quietly among themselves as people filtered in and out of the bustling lobby.
Mr. Robles, who plans to stay at the hotel until Sunday morning, said he and his friends were now coordinating how to get back to New York City. When asked about how they planned to travel, Mr. Robles answered immediately.
“Train or airplane.”
Maia Coleman is a reporter for The Times covering the New York Police Department and criminal justice in the New York area.
Christopher Maag is a reporter covering the New York City region for The Times.
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