Bathurst New Brunswick Bus Crash Victims

Seven members of the Bathurst High School senior boys basketball team and one female teacher have been killed just after midnight in a highway crash south of Bathurst, N.B.

"Our members arrived to find an indescribable scene." said Sgt. Derek Strong, media relations officer for New Brunswick RCMP. "Eight of the occupants of the minibus were dead at the scene. Seven male students aged 15 to 18 and one adult female."

The students were returning from a game in Moncton.

"The bus was operated by a male teacher." said Strong. "Unfortunately on Route 11 just south of Bathurst, due to poor driving conditions, the driver of the vehicle lost control and had a head on collision with a tractor trailer," said Strong.

The three surviving students and one adult from the bus were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.

"It was extremely traumatic. Our members are trained to deal with a certain amount of calls of an unpleasant nature but last night was beyond description. Really hard on our members." said Strong. "We can only dare to imagine what the families are going through today."

The driver of the bus survived and the driver of the tractor trailer did not sustain any injuries according to police.

The city has set up a crisis centre.

"We are a city in mourning," said Bathurst mayor Stephen Brunet. "We're still in a state of shock."

Brunet said the crisis centre at the high school is to help students and families cope with the tragedy. "The only thing we can do is stick together and support each other," Brunet said. "Our hearts go out to the students and the teacher."

School district superintendent John McLaughlin said the community is tightly knit, and that residents gathered early Saturday morning to grieve. "A lot of (students) are coming to the school just to be together," he told CTV news.

Police say that preliminary indications suggest that the cause of this accident was the weather and driving conditions. Reports say that conditions were slippery around the time of the crash, with freezing rain and snow falling in the area.

The police do not suspect any illegal activity that would have contributed to this accident.

"However, there is a need to better understand what took place." said Strong. "We have several accident reconsructionists at the scene right now trying to put it back together and find out precisely what took place.

Bathurst is one of the largest cities in northern New Brunswick.