Sierre Coach Crash

Nightfall in Valais

It's easy to picture how the story should have ended. A day of alpine sunshine in the Val d’Anniviers, bundled bags and tired laughter, children comparing ski stories, and—after the long dark hours on the road—a coach creaking to a stop outside a quiet school, sleepy faces pressed to windows glowing orange in the dawn.

But on March 13, 2012, the bus carrying 39 Belgian children and 7 adults would never make that final stop.

Instead, inside a fluorescent-lit tunnel carved into the mountains outside Sierre, Switzerland, joy was replaced by something unspeakable. In the course of a few blinding seconds, 28 lives were gone, and two small Belgian towns—Lommel and Heverlee, hundreds of miles away—were changed forever.

Traditions, Promises, and the Journey Home

For children all across Europe, the week-long ski trip is a rite of passage. In Lommel’s ‘t Stekske primary school and St Lambertus in Heverlee, anticipation had been building for months. None of the students was older than twelve; for many, it was their first trip to the Alps, the first time boarding a bus that would cross a border, winding high into the snowy peaks.

Every detail was checked and double-checked. The coach—barely a year old—was a modern Setra, gleaming and powerful, run by Top Tours, a company with no history of serious accidents. The roads it would travel were Swiss: famously safe, obsessively maintained.

When the bus departed the ski resort on that Tuesday evening, it was like the closing scene of a thousand safe, happy holidays. Teachers, parents, and chaperones—in charge, responsible, and tired in the best way—settled in for the overnight journey. The air was thick with the low hum of conversation and screens flickering in the dim. Behind them, snowy mountains slipped away under cover of darkness.

Into the Tunnel

Around 9:00 PM, the bus entered the Sierre Tunnel on the A9 motorway. From the outside, nothing about that night hinted at trouble. The road was dry and traffic was light.

No one aboard knew they were about to become part of a national tragedy.

Tunnel cameras later captured what happened: For reasons still unproven, just as the bus passed one of the tunnel’s emergency lay-bys—a concrete alcove carved into the right wall—the vehicle suddenly lurched toward the curb. Testimony and forensic analysis would suggest no skid marks, no frantic corrections.

The coach’s right side mounted the curb and scraped along the wall for several meters. Then, with grim inevitability, it struck the end wall of the bay nearly head-on. The front of the bus folded, metal collapsing inward with the force of nearly 100 kilometers per hour.

Chaos and Heroism in Fluorescent Light

What followed was frantic, desperate, and haunted by the echoes of the unthinkable. The tunnel’s hard surfaces reflected the sounds: the shrill of alarms, shouts in French and Flemish, the hum of machinery and the thud of boots running on concrete.

Swiss emergency services reacted nearly instantly. Ambulances and fire crews descended on the tunnel in minutes. Rescue workers in reflective gear, some young, some old enough to remember other disasters, faced a scene that would test even their seasoned nerves: The front of the bus was crushed, pinning the driver and chaperones. Children, many dazed or wounded, were trapped in their seats. To reach those most desperate for help, rescuers had to cut open the side of the bus, piece by jagged piece. They worked in the blue flicker of emergency lights, surrounded by scattered bags, shoes, and brightly colored school jackets.

It took hours to extricate everyone. For 22 children and 6 adults—both drivers among them—there was nothing more that could be done.

Mourning Two Towns, and a Nation

News of the crash filtered back to Belgium in the dead of night. Phones rang in homes around Lommel and Heverlee; first with worry, then dread, and finally the reality that would empty classrooms and bring an entire country to a halt.

By sunrise, crowds gathered outside both schools, candles guttering in the chill wind. Journalists and town officials mingled with parents and children. It felt, some would later say, like a collective wound: not just one family’s loss, but a national grief.

Flags flew at half-mast. State television broadcast funeral services, and the king and queen of Belgium stood among mourners with visible shock on their faces. In Switzerland, too, the pain was raw; rescue workers spoke openly, in the careful way such men often do, about the images they would never forget.

The Unanswered Question

From the start, investigators faced an uncomfortable truth: Sometimes, even with all of Switzerland’s order and Belgium’s diligence, fate cannot be reasoned with.

Both the Belgian and Swiss authorities examined every angle. The bus was new and mechanically sound. Speed was within legal limits. No sign of drinking, no evidence the drivers were overtired or unwell. There were rumors—had the driver reached for a DVD player, or suffered a sudden medical event?—but nothing was ever definitively proven.

Swiss prosecutors would later call it a “probable but inexplicable loss of control.” There was relief in the absence of criminal negligence, but frustration too. Closure for the grieving seemed just out of reach.

In the Wake of Disaster

The human toll of that night went far beyond casualty numbers.

Twenty-four children survived, many bearing wounds that would outlast the crash: injuries requiring repeated surgeries, memories too heavy for childhood. Schools in Lommel and Heverlee organized support—grief counselors, therapy sessions, and ceremonies where pain and hope mixed in equal measure.

For months, every small gesture in both towns—flowers left at schoolyard fences, letters pinned to notice boards—was a silent promise: You will not be forgotten.

Swiss and Belgian governments responded forcefully, allocating emergency funds and tightening communications for families still in Switzerland. Funeral arrangements and the repatriation of the lost were coordinated with utmost care, in recognition of lives interrupted.

The coach operator, Top Tours, ceased operations for a time. Insurance and liability matters dragged out in the courts, but few in Belgium really cared about paperwork; the focus stayed on names and faces.

Redesign and Reconsideration

Modern Europe prides itself on building safe places, and the Sierre crash forced a reckoning with what “safe enough” really means.

Tunnel engineers revisited the design of emergency bays—why was the wall so unforgiving?—and introduced new signage and softer buffers. In Belgium, the rules for school trip itineraries, chaperone-to-child ratios, and bus safety checks grew tighter, the lessons written with a pen dipped in heartbreak.

Neither country promised that such a thing could never happen again. But they promised, quietly and with resolve, to do what they could.

Memory, Monument, and Tomorrow’s Buses

Three years on, in 2015, both nations came together to mourn and to remember. There are now memorials, engraved with the names of the lost, in both Belgium and Switzerland.

What lingers is not just the silence of two towns, or the quiet ache in the Sierre tunnel’s polished new walls. It’s the way families, neighbors, and strangers from across borders understood—if only for a moment—how one tragedy can ripple outward, touching lives and countries that had never before met.

The stories told each March are careful, honest ones, woven through with moments of kindness: a rescuer carrying a child, a teacher holding someone else’s hand, the way a community learns to live with loss, if never to accept it.

There is no grand mystery, no villain, no final paragraph to this story. Only the memory of a bus rolling quietly through mountain darkness—and the love, the imagination, the staggering hope carried by every child who glimpsed the lights of home at journey’s end.