Hot air balloon crash kills 16 in Texas

A hot air balloon burst into flames over central Texas on Saturday after it struck power lines and plunged into a field, killing all 16 people aboard in one of the deadliest such accidents on record, police and eyewitnesses said.

“It does not appear at this time that there were any survivors of the crash,” Caldwell County sheriff Daniel Law said in a statement provided by his office. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety later confirmed that 16 people were dead.

Emergency responders in Texas said the basket portion of the balloon, which carries the passenger and crew, caught fire.

Aerial television footage from the aftermath of the accident showed remnants of the red, white and blue balloon, adorned with a large, yellow smiley face wearing sunglasses, lying flattened at the crash site.

Lynn Lunsford, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said the balloon caught fire in flight at about 7.40am local time. The balloon crashed near Lockhart, about 30 miles south of Austin.

The cause of the fire is not yet known. Lunsford declined to give any details about the scene or to hypothesize on how the crash might have happened, saying investigators from the agency as well as local and federal authorities including the FBI’s evidence response team would help analyze the scene.

“This is a normal practice for the NTSB in events that are classified as major accidents, and that’s what this case is,” he said.

Weather experts, victim identification experts and other specialists would come to the scene, Erik Grosof, a spokesman at the scene, added. “Much like a crime scene, you only get one chance at it so we want to make sure we do everything correctly.”

Grosof said the balloon was believed to have been operated by Heart of Texas Hot Air Balloon Rides, a company that serves the Austin, Houston and San Antonio areas.

The balloon crashed in an area of farmland and open fields of corn crops and cattle, and police held press back at a far distance from the dirt road where emergency vehicles gathered. A line of electrical towers loomed over the site, which was baking under 94F heat and mostly clear skies on Saturday.

Margaret Wiley, a nearby resident who lives not far from the crash site, told the Associated Press that she was letting her dog out Saturday morning when she heard a “pop, pop, pop”.

“I looked around and it was like a fireball going up,” she said, noting that the fireball was located under large power lines and almost high enough to reach the bottom of them.

The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, said in a statement: “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families, as well as the Lockhart community.”

According to National Transportation Safety Board records, before Saturday there were 17 fatal balloon accidents in the US between January 2002 and June 2016, with a total of 21 fatalities. Before Saturday, it appears the worst recorded accident in US ballooning history was in August 1993, when six people died when a sudden gust of wind caused their balloon to collide with a power line near Aspen, Colorado, and the basket was severed and fell to the ground.