A school bus carrying primary students slipped off an icy country road into an irrigation ditch in eastern China, killing at least 15 children and highlighting serious problems with child safety following a similar tragedy last month.
Eight other children were injured, one of them seriously, a spokesman for the Jiangsu provincial government said Tuesday.
The accident happened Monday evening as the bus was traveling along a rural highway outside the city of Xuzhou in the province's north. Chinese news reports said the bus careened off the road after swerving to avoid a pedicab.
The spokesman, who like many Chinese officials refused to give his name, said the ages of the victims and the total number of people on the bus were not immediately known. The official Xinhua News Agency said 29 students were on board at the time of the crash, and that the bus was designed for 52 people and was not overloaded.
Witnesses cited by China News Service said the bus fell into a 7-foot (2-meter) -wide irrigation ditch. Workers from a nearby food processing plant rushed to help, jumping into the icy water to save the children.
The crash comes amid an emotional national discussion over the poor condition of Chinese school buses and chronic underfunding of public schools, particularly in rural areas which have lagged far behind cities over the past three decades of rapid economic development.
Last month, 19 students and two adults were killed when a nine-seat private school van packed with 62 children crashed head-on with a truck in northwest Gansu province.
That was followed by a high-profile pledge from Premier Wen Jiabao that new rules to ensure school safety would be drafted within a month. Wen said central and local governments would bear the cost of bringing often-shoddy school buses up to standard.
New regulations proposed Sunday by China's Cabinet provide guidelines such as forbidding private vehicles from overtaking buses when students are getting on or off, but do not address to what extent the government will fund school transport.
Many school buses are operated by car rental companies and even co-financed by parents.
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