ANCHOVY, St James – A Cambridge High School student was reduced to tears Thursday on learning that a bus in which he was travelling with his peers had plunged into a ravine shortly after he disembarked.

One man is dead, four students and two adults were taken to hospital. Among them is one boy who reportedly sustained serious injuries to his head.

The ninth grade student, who opted not to provide his name, said soon after he disembarked the bus at King Gate he got news that his fellow students had not made it much farther towards their destination of Montego Bay.

“I feel a way when I heard; I started to cry,” the teen told the Jamaica Observer.

He had rushed to the scene and was among those who gathered on the slippery and rain-slicked stretch of road on Long Hill, anxiously watching as first responders and passers-by worked to remove passengers from the crash. The Toyota Hiace bus had trouble navigating a corner and careened off the road at a known hot spot that has been the scene of past crashes. The area is said to be particularly treacherous when it rains, as it did Thursday afternoon.

“Three of my friends were in the back. When I came I try to see them, but they were being taken to the hospital,” the teenager said woefully. He told the Observer that a male passenger who had only recently entered the vehicle at Lethe crossing was the man who died in the crash.

The vehicle fell and rolled about 500 feet then landed on its side in a mangled heap. Passers-by placed it on what was left of its wheels as they scrambled to get to those inside.

A man known only as Pompey, a bus operator on the same route, said he was the second person to reach the bus.

“When I go down there I see couple people trapped in the vehicle and one of the school youth kind of mash out,” he told the Observer at the scene.

“The school youth seemed to be in serious condition and one man look like him dead, and we [carefully] take out the schoolers,” he added.

Others who climbed into the ravine to help described scenes of broken bones and a mad rush to get the injured out.

Firefighters were fast on the scene and skilfully rappelled down the steep and heavily vegetated hillside to get to the boulder-strewn area below. Police soon joined them and combed the bushes for anyone who may have been flung clear of the vehicle. Light but steady rainfall made it difficult at times to cover the 15-minute walk to the road where Good Samaritans helped transport the injured to hospital.

Traffic was backed up for miles on the heavily travelled Long Hill road as a result of the crash.