“Oh No, My Car”: NJ Transit Bus Crashes Into a New Jersey Home
The first passengers had yet to board when an NJ Transit bus veered into a residential property in Englewood, New Jersey, and crashed into a house on Thursday, October 8. ABC7 New York reported that the driver was injured.
The Route 166 bus had just left the Oradell garage and was heading toward its first stop near Grand Avenue when it crashed just before 5:45 a.m. on Rockwood Place, near Route 4.
Karina Martinez and her husband were already awake when they heard a loud thud. Living near the highway, they initially thought they were hearing passing trucks, until the noise continued and her husband looked outside.
“Oh no, my car,” he said, Martinez recalled in her interview with the station. The couple had moved into their home only a few months earlier and had new landscaping in the yard.
“I was scared for for the bus driver because I didn’t know or passengers. I didn’t know if it was full of passengers either,” Martinez said in the broadcast.
At the Doorstep
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The Eyewitness News broadcast describes surveillance footage of the bus veering off the road, crossing a lawn, and hitting a boulder before reaching the house.
Martinez’s husband’s Jeep and the new landscaping were damaged. The bus also struck another vehicle in a neighboring driveway and damaged part of the neighboring house.
The owner of the house that was struck told News 12 that nobody was inside when it happened. The property had been used as an Airbnb until about a month earlier.
Emergency crews arrived within minutes, removed the driver on a stretcher, and took him to a local hospital, where he was treated and released. Englewood’s buildings department and PSE&G also responded, with concerns about the house’s structural integrity. During the early live broadcast, emergency crews were working around the bus as they assessed the building and determined how to pull it away from the side of the house.
A USA TODAY Network photograph published through Reuters Connect documents an unsafe-structure notice posted on the house after the crash.
CBS New York reported that fire officials said the driver suffered a medical emergency before the crash.
Englewood police are investigating the cause of the collision.
