Passenger saves busload after driver suffers heart attack

As he told kozan.gr, “I was sitting in the middle of the bus. At some point, I heard a jolt, I jumped, the bus had started hitting the protective barriers.”

Describing what he saw when he reached the front of the bus, he said that “the driver was lying on his side and had lost consciousness. I grabbed the steering wheel and tried to press the brake while the driver had his feet there. I reacted instinctively, I have never driven a bus before.”

According to him, “the people were upset and in a panic, but as soon as we stopped, everyone calmed down.”

“The driver had a heart attack, a young man grabbed the steering wheel and we were saved,” passenger Evangelia Michaelidou had said for her part about the moments of panic on the bus that derailed in Ptolemaida.

Speaking to Status FM 107.7, passenger Evangelia Michaelidou, who uses this particular bus daily to go to work, shared her own experience: “Our driver had a heart attack, they told us he had a heart attack, he had a heart attack.” She herself reflected on the calm reaction of the young passenger: “Fortunately, we had a kid from work here, very good, who took control of the bus and stopped,” she said, visibly shocked by the incident.

Mrs. Michaelidou described the conditions of the route: “We start at six in the morning and we are at work at seven. The driver was fine.” And she added: “I know that the driver was fine every day. He just had a seizure. At the time the bus hit the side, we all understood at that time. Fortunately, we were lucky, at that time there were not many vehicles, so we were fine. The girl sitting in the front, she understood and called someone to take the wheel and the child went.”

The eyewitness also said that she had known the driver for years and that he was a man with whom the workers had daily contact on the personnel transport line to the PPC station. The 56-year-old was the father of two girls, a fact that adds additional weight to the human dimension of the tragic incident.

The passenger who saved 25 people when the driver had a heart attack: “I ran and grabbed the steering wheel, I reacted instinctively”

The general secretary of the “Spartakos” workers’ union, Sakis Mastoras, told Thessaloniki radio station Status FM 107.7 that the 56-year-old felt unwell and a calm passenger intervened and stepped on the brake, stopping the bus.

Despite immediate mobilization, the doctors’ efforts to revive him were unsuccessful. CPR was attempted on the 56-year-old driver for 45 minutes, but the man was unable to make it and breathed his last.