A tour van collided with a pickup truck near Yellowstone National Park and both erupted in flames, killing seven people.
The vehicles crashed into each other on US Highway 20 close to Henry’s Lake shortly before 7.15pm on Thursday, according to Idaho State Police.
Six of the 14 people in the Mercedes van were killed, and the driver of the Dodge Ram pickup also died.
Two people on the highway who witnessed the collision were ‘trying to pull out as many as they could’ from the smoking van, Fremont County coroner Brenda Dye told The New York Times on Friday. They managed to rescue eight people, including a child, before the van caught on fire.
An air ambulance as well as ground units were dispatched to respond to the scene because of the severe injuries, police said.
A video recorded by a witness, Roger Merrill, 60, showed the van completely ablaze with black smoke rising into the air, and a damaged red pickup nearby. Firefighters and paramedics dashed toward the vehicles.
‘It took an unnervingly long time for help to arrive just because of the location,’ said Merrill.
‘It is a very dangerous highway. It’s extremely busy.’
All six van victims were burned beyond recognition and are pending DNA testing results for identification, Dye said. They were from outside the US and two of them have been confirmed to be from Italy. They joined the tour to see Yellowstone, which was established in 1872 an is the oldest national park in the world.
The pickup driver has been identified as Isaiah Moreno, 25, of Texas. He was the only occupant in the truck.
Eight injured people were rushed to a hospital.
The crash site is about 15 miles from Yellowstone. The highway was closed in both directions and reopened around 2am on Friday. The cause of the crash remains under investigation.
It happened nine months after two tour airboats collided at Cypress Lake in Florida and more than a dozen people were hospitalized.
