Six people have died after a school bus and commuter bus collided early Tuesday in Southwest Baltimore, police said.
No students were on the school bus during the crash, police said.
Baltimore Police spokesman T.J. Smith said “significant injuries” were reported, and that closures should be expected in the 3800 block of Frederick Avenue.
The crash prompted significant response from Baltimore Fire Department medics, and closed Frederick Avenue near Monastery Avenue.
“We are in the process of gathering information on the bus crash. We will advise once we have more. Understand this is a fluid situation,” Smith wrote on Twitter.
Images from television news helicopters showed the yellow school bus crashed head-on into the front, driver side of the MTA bus, crumpling the front of the school bus and ripping the side off the commuter vehicle.
Kevin Travers, 55, a maintenance worker for St. Joseph’s Monastery nearby, said he’d walked past the scene of the crash just before it happened.
He went inside the maintenance building at Frederick Avenue and South Morley Street about 6:15 a.m., and then heard the police helicopter overhead when he took the recycling out 15 minutes later.
“It happened real fast,” Travers said.
Mary Schruefer, 60, an administrator at Mountain Manor Treatment Center, a drug addition counseling facility at the monastery, peered down at the crash scene from a side road.
“That’s horrible,” she said. “It just opened up the side of the bus.”
Lori Shannon, 54, a staff accountant at the the treatment facility, said she had to take a detour onto Wilkens Avenue on her way into work due to the road closure. A coworker called her and told her about the fatal accident.
“It’s shocking to see this,” Shannon said.
The scene is about two blocks from Mount St. Joseph High School. The school opened an hour late Tuesday for All Saints Day, and the opening was not delayed further, school officials said.
Baltimore schools spokeswoman Edie House Foster said the bus was contracted for the city school system. She could not immediately say early Tuesday which school the bus was for.