Before the accident, the driver of the Copsa car 540 Sended a Audio via WhatsApp to a colleague on the Copsa East line, noting that the vehicle was moving and the passengers were complaining.
“Here I go on Wave 540, everyone complains, you don’t know what this is. It jiggles everywhere. I don’t know whether to take it to 80, if to take it to 100, to take it to 95. I don’t know!” says the driver in the audio.
In another passage, he indicates that he transmitted the situation to another company official, who in turn had told him that there were many complaints about the malfunction of that bus.
The authenticity of the audio was confirmed by The Observer with Copsa workers. The audio went viral after the accident. WhatsApp notes that it was “resent many times.”
The manager of Copsa, Javier Cardoso, said that the audio had reached him but that it is not about a driver who had an accident, and that the conversation “does not conform to reality.” In any case, he could not say if it was a driver of that car and indicated that he would find out the details.
Juan Arellano, leader of Unott, said that the transport union federation had heard the audio and sought to confirm its authenticity.
“We knew that there were several bills from previous days asking for the repair of that unit,” Arellano added.
When a driver finishes the shift, he informs on a ticket about the state of the vehicle.
The driver, a 55-year-old man, underwent surgery this Friday afternoon due to wrist fractures and significant injuries to his spine.
The Prosecutor’s Office, meanwhile, continues with the investigation into the accident. The Copsa bus left the route and overturned this Thursday, when it was heading from Montevideo to Punta del Este. As balance of the accident a 15 year old teenagerwho was traveling in the vehicle, died at the scene.
Twenty people were injured. Several remain hospitalized, some in serious condition.
Several of the passengers reported on social networks that the bus was moving in all directions, coinciding with what the driver described in the audio.
Iván Silchenko wrote on his Instagram account that “it swayed from side to side like we had never seen in our lives, several of us complained before and after the trip and we took a photo to denounce what happened and it went back on a trip shortly after! “.
Romina Mangino, a member of the Copsa union leadership, told The Observer that there were multiple complaints about the malfunction of car 540 and that several effective drivers of the company refused to drive it.
The driver who had an accident was hired as a harvester, added.
Mangino said that there is another car, the 528, about which there are multiple complaints about its malfunction, the same thing that happened with the 540.
