Two tradesmen who ran to help at the site of Tuesday's school bus crash in Melbourne have spoken of the horrific scenes they faced as they tried to rescue the children.
Cameron Chalmers, who works for an air conditioning company, was driving home from work behind the truck when the accident took place.
"I had another car in front of me and then we just saw the bus pretty much do a 180 and flip over on the other side of the road. It just happened really quick," Mr Chalmers said.
"We ran around to the bus. We weren't sure if there was one person in there or a heap of people.
"We ripped the sunroofs off and found all these kids in the bus. That was horrible."
He said some children were already standing up in the bus when they arrived, and others were still strapped to their seats in seatbelts.
"The kids were screaming and there was smoke and dust. And we just started pulling out as many kids as we could out of those sunroofs."
Fellow tradie Dean Eastway was also driving behind the truck when the accident happened. When he reached the bus he said the wheels were still spinning.
He said the children were "obviously terrified, they were trapped and yelling out, 'I don't want to be in a bus again. Where's mum?' All sorts of stuff, and there were all sorts of injuries. It was just terrible."
Mr Chalmers said, "We took out all of the kids that we could. I couldn't even tell you how many, probably 30 maybe.
"Once we got those out we found kids that were stuck. So we jumped in the bus and were just trying to help them.
"There were other people there trying to lift seats and then we realised [the children] were stuck."
Mr Chalmers said he tried to help one boy and two girls who had their arms trapped in the wreckage.
"We just kept talking to them and held their hands and just looked after them."
Mr Eastway said, "We sat there and we asked them their names … and just tried to keep them calm, just talking to them and reassuring them."
Neither can remember how much time elapsed before emergency services arrived.
Mr Chalmers and Mr Eastway remained at the scene until all the children had been taken away.
They said the reality of what had taken place was only just dawning on them.
Victoria Police Superintendent Michael Cruse praised the people who stopped to help at the scene.
"We had passers-by who have heroically stopped immediately … assisting the children who could be removed from the bus," he said.
"Then we obviously had the emergency services respond. Some of the children were trapped.
"It was chaotic and it would have been really confronting for those passers-by, so I think a special mention to those people."
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