A fire engine and a motor coach crashed into each other on a Vietnamese highway on Sunday, leaving nine people wounded.

The incident occurred at around 4:30 pm near a tollgate on the Phap Van-Cau Gie Expressway in southern Hanoi.

The fire truck from the Hanoi fire department en route for the scene of a traffic accident that had happened earlier on the same highway slammed into a long-distance 45-seat bus.

The on-duty emergency service vehicle was barreling in the wrong direction at the time.

The collision injured nine people, five of whom were passengers and four were firemen, while the vehicles’ front parts were severely damaged.

A drizzle on the freeway caused poor visibility and a slippery road surface, leading to the vehicles, traveling at high speed, unable to respond safely, according to a leader from the fire department.

The accident resulted in serious congestion on the highway in one direction, and belonged to a series of crashes on Sunday afternoon.

Half an hour earlier, at around 4:00 pm, a 16-seat coach rear-ended a truck moving in the same direction, wounding three, according to VietnamNet.

A pile-up of four cars played out, about 15 minutes later, roughly seven kilometers away from this spot.

Around this time point, a tractor-trailer moving in the other direction of the freeway ran into the median barrier.  

Traffic was hence hampered in both directions well into midnight on Sunday.

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