At least five people were dead in Los Angeles after back-to-back accidents late Tuesday in which a van broadsided a bus and then an NBC news helicopter, apparently hovering nearby to cover the story, plummeted to the ground and burst into flames, the authorities said.
The crashes, which brought scores of emergency responders to the San Fernando Valley neighborhood of Chatsworth during the evening rush hour, stunned the sprawling city and left the television news crews who cover it — often from news choppers — struggling to maintain their composure on the air.
An NBC4 anchor, who had earlier told viewers that the station had lost contact with its helicopter crew, confirmed that the helicopter that had crashed had been carrying members of the station’s team.
“We are going to take a couple of minutes to think about that, process it,” the anchor, Colleen Williams, said haltingly. Then the station abruptly ended its news coverage and switched to other programming. NBC4 later said that its reporter Eliana Moreno and pilot George Marciniw had been aboard the helicopter and were killed in the crash.
In confirming that the helicopter belonged to NBC4, the station noted that several news helicopters had been in the area covering a road crash.
The authorities said the chain of events began shortly after 5 p.m., when a southbound S.U.V. slammed into an eastbound Los Angeles Metro bus, killing at least two people and critically injuring several others. Television news crews rushed to the scene, where the SUV was lodged in the side of the bus, pinning passengers inside.
Branden Silverman, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, was speaking with reporters at the scene of the bus crash when he saw a column of smoke rising nearby. He said he immediately left for the helicopter crash.
The fire department said in an alert that the helicopter had crashed around 7 p.m. between two commercial buildings, killing at least three people. The resulting fire damaged four vehicles and two shipping containers. Live video aired by local television stations showed the wreckage, shipping containers and several vehicles in flames, with thick smoke rising from the site.
Mr. Silverman said that one of those killed was a pedestrian in a parking lot near the crash site.
In a statement, NBC4 and Telemundo 52, its Spanish-language sister station, said the helicopter had been providing aerial news coverage for both stations.
Esteban Jimenez, a helicopter pilot, said that he had spoken just last Sunday with his friend Mr. Marciniw, the pilot of the NBC4 helicopter, about their plans to retire. He said three colleagues at NBC Telemundo called him to the scene and told him that they had lost contact with the helicopter.
“I called Eliana and I called George. They weren’t picking up. That’s when I started panicking,” he said.
Eliana Moreno was an aerial journalist who worked with NBC4 and Telemundo through Angel City Air, a news-gathering company based in Pacoima, a neighborhood of Los Angeles. She graduated from Chapman University in 2010 and worked for several news organizations in Los Angeles and Orange County before beginning her work with NBC4. She was engaged to be married, according to her Facebook page.
It was not immediately clear whether the death toll would rise.
“The helicopter itself is pretty well destroyed, so we are going to have to go through the rubble and see how many victims there were on board as well as identify the helicopter,” Mr. Silverman said.
The National Transportation Safety Board will lead the investigation into the crash, the Los Angeles Police Department said on social media. The N.T.S.B. said in an email that its investigator would arrive at the scene on Wednesday morning.
“This is a very, very, very tragic day in Los Angeles,” Mayor Karen Bass said.
Lindsey P. Horvath, the Los Angeles County supervisor whose district includes Chatsworth, promised a thorough examination of the crashes. “There are serious questions about what happened tonight,” she said.
News helicopter crashes are rare, even in Southern California, where local television stations routinely use them to provide aerial coverage of a region encompassing thousands of square miles.
Nonetheless, for the pilots and helicopter reporters who have become familiar figures in Los Angeles television news, Tuesday’s losses were sobering.
“We’re always saying, out of safety, cover the news, don’t be the news,” Desmond Shaw, a veteran helicopter news reporter for CBS LA, said in an interview with his station on Tuesday. “Unfortunately, gut wrenchingly, they were part of the news tonight.”
Francesca Regalado contributed reporting.
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