A van carrying eight College students hit a patch of ice and crashed on the way back to Hanover from Montreal Monday night, but no one was seriously injured.
The students, all freshmen, were returning on Interstate 89 through Vermont after a three-day trip during Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend when the accident occurred.
Around 9:30 p.m. Monday night, approximately three miles north of White River Junction, Vt., the van "hit a patch of black ice" while changing lanes, according to the driver, Bill Burgess '01.
The vehicle started to skid and hit a snow-covered median, flipping over "about a time and a half," Burgess said. "It all happened in a couple of seconds."
The van, a rental from Lebanon's Rent-A-Wreck, landed on its side with the driver side window facing up, he said.
One of the passengers, Elenor Mak '01, said the occupants were sleepy and the driver was really exhausted right before the accident occurred.
Mak said she was sitting behind the driver and heard him yell before the crash. "We skidded on the ice and we did a 180."
Only some of the passengers were wearing seatbelts, according to Mak. Nobody involved in the crash went to the hospital, although one of the passengers has to wear a neck brace for about a week.
"Most of us walked away with barely a scratch," Burgess said.
The other passengers in the van were P. K. Lincoln Lau, Candice Ling, Masashi Kiyomine, Wen-Hsin Lin, Masachika Akashi and Genevieve Yong, all members of the Class of 2001.
The students had not originally planned to drive at night on the weekend trip and were supposed to leave Montreal at 11 a.m. on Monday, Mak said, but a dead battery in their rental van caused a two-hour delay.
After their delay, the group got lost for two hours and had another breakdown, she said.
Police were quick to respond to the accident. The Vermont State Police in Bethel handled the incident, but the officer in charge of the accident was unavailable for comment yesterday.
In a Fall term accident, Adam Dansiger '00 flipped his Mazda Navajo sports utility vehicle three times on the same Interstate where Monday's accident occurred.
Two unidentified passengers were injured in the October accident, and Dansiger received severe head injuries.
Dansiger is still recovering at the John F. Kennedy Coma Rehabilitation Center in Edison, N.J.
