Deadly bus fire exposes lax traffic safety supervision

 
ZHENGZHOU/JINAN, July 23 (Xinhua) -- Safety supervision targeting long-haul bus service in China has come under scrutiny in the wake of a fire that left 41 people dead and six others injured early Friday morning.
A total of 47 people were on board when a long-distance bus caught fire at 4 a.m. Friday on the Beijing-Zhuhai Expressway near the city of Xinyang in central China's Henan Province. The accident was the deadliest of its kind in years.
The double-decker sleeper bus was on its way from the city of Weihai in east China's Shandong Province to Changsha, the capital of central China's Hunan Province.
Although the cause of the blaze is still being investigated, lax safety supervision might be to blame for the tragedy, as the bus was overloaded when the fire occurred, according to preliminary investigations.
A spokesman with an investigative team in Weihai said that the bus was not carrying any passengers when it departed from a local long-distance bus station at 10 a.m. Thursday.
The bus station is responsible for safety checks mainly to prevent passengers from carrying flammable or explosive materials.
However, GPS data showed that it made at least five stops in Shandong's cities of Weihai, Yantai and Jining cities, which suggests that the bus picked up passengers along the way, where safety checks are nonexistence.
The survivors of the fire told investigators that the vehicle was overloaded when it entered Henan.
The bus was designed to carry 35 passengers, but was carrying 47 at the time of the accident. Work safety officials in Henan believe that some of the passengers may have had flammable or explosive materials in their luggage. However, the officials also said that it did not seem that the bus had been stopped for safety checks during its 1,000-km journey from Weihai to Xinyang.