Grain and pieces of glass from the windows still remind Nikolinka Makaeva of the crash on the Trakia Motorway. Two days after the collision, she continues to find them among her belongings and in the pockets of her clothes.
“Grain and glass from the windows in my bag. I am keeping them, but I will probably throw them away because they bring back bad memories,” Makaeva told bTV.
The woman worked as a teacher for 30 years. She was travelling with a group from the town of Levski to a sanatorium in Nessebar. The bus collided with a Romanian lorry, after which a truck loaded with grain crashed into it from behind. During the collision, grain and glass rained down on the passengers.
“We had been travelling since 2 a.m. Those who were awake and managed to hold on to the seats, so to speak, remained there, while those who were asleep fell into the aisle onto the grain. On top of one another. We could not open the doors to get out,” Makaeva recalls.
Passengers were evacuated through a broken window
Genoveva Mihaylova, also a passenger on the bus, showed the injury she suffered when she hit the seat. She says she counted six impacts from behind.
Getting out of the bus became possible with the help of young people who were near the crash site. “The young men broke the glass, one of them climbed outside, opened the door and they then began evacuating us from the bus,” Mihaylova says. According to her, the shock was immense.
Another passenger told bTV that he saw two more vehicles near the Romanian truck – an SUV in front of it and a passenger car that had spun around and was facing against the direction of traffic. This is his eyewitness account of what he saw at the crash site.
Some of the group managed to reach Nessebar, but what they experienced continues to weigh heavily on the survivors. Dr Plamen Lakov describes their condition as serious stress that will inevitably affect them.
For Nikolinka Makaeva, the memory also remains in her bag. The grain and glass take her back to the moment when the journey to the sanatorium turned into a struggle to get out of the bus.