ANGUISH: Chung Ninh (left) and a passenger named Victor told of the crash’s aftermath. (j.c. rice)
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They were lulled to sleep by the hum of the road.
But riders on the $15 Chinatown-bound bus awoke in hell — jarred into a nightmare of screeching brakes, mangled metal and horrifying death.
“I saw people split open. It was awful,” one passenger named Victor recalled of yesterday’s catastrophic I-95 crash.
“Someone was crying for help . . . One man lost his hands. He was alive when the emergency people took him from the bus. People were crying. People were screaming . . . I saw a lot of death.”
Rescuers described an incredible scene of passengers crushed when the overturned bus skidded into the stanchion of a roadside sign that sliced into the vehicle “at face level.”
Chung Ninh, 59, recalled dangling in the air and clinging to his seat as the bus lurched onto its side. He and a few other passengers managed to crawl through the hatch in the roof of the bus — clawing through people covered in broken glass and trapped inside the wreckage.
“There was a lot of blood all over the people,” said Ninh.
As he tried to check one woman’s pulse, bus driver Ophadell Williams screamed: “She died. She died. Forget this one, help another one!”
Yesterday, frantic relatives were on a desperate search for loved ones who may or may not have been on the World Wide Tours bus, scrambling between Jacobi and St. Barnabas hospitals, where the injured were taken, and the city Medical Examiner’s Office in Manhattan.
One man was trying to find his elderly mother and her friend, who had gone to gamble in Connecticut. Their names weren’t on the list of the dead. He brought pictures of the women to Jacobi Hospital, where two women from the bus were in surgery — unrecognizable with swelling from their injuries.
“I’m just going to have to wait — I’ll wait all day,” one distraught man vowed.