On the night of July 30 to 31, 1982, two buses transported 107 children from Crépy-en-Valois (Oise), towards Savoie. Most of them, disadvantaged, are going to a summer camp for the first time. The tragedy occurs around 1:40 a.m., when the cars reach the “funnel” of kilometer point 313, in the town of Merceuil, not far from Beaune (Côte-d’Or). The rain-soaked road narrows and drops from three lanes to two. The driver of the first bus, tired from having driven 700 km the day before and having rested only 3-4 hours in the meantime, reacts too late when a German bus slows down in front of him. The two vehicles collide at 16 km/h, but a 2CV crashes into the first French coach and is sandwiched by the second. Then, another car crashes into them, followed by five others, and the chain collision ignites.
Evacuated, all the occupants of the first coach survived. In the second, whose door is blocked by a crashed car, 44 children, two monitors and two drivers are burned to death; only about fifteen children manage to escape. The cars involved in the accident have five dead, including two children.
The accident, the deadliest in France to date, caused a stir in the press. François Mitterrand, President of the Republic at that time, attended the funeral on August 5, 1982 in Crépy-en-Valois. At the time, no psychological follow-up was planned, neither for the bereaved families, nor for the firefighters who had to extract the remains from the burnt-out vehicles.
The investigation shows failures in the second bus: defective brakes and 600,000 km on the odometer. At the trial, held in Dijon, the carrier was sentenced to 18 months suspended prison sentence and a fine of 25,000 francs (38,112 euros).
The A6 accident led to measures well known to motorists today, in order to prevent a tragedy of such magnitude from happening again: the compulsory installation of speed limiters, the limitation of the speed of public transport at 90 km/h, and the speed limit in rainy weather at 110 km/h on the motorway and 80 km/h on the road. Buses must be built with non-flammable materials and have laminated glass windscreens, and can no longer transport children on crossover weekends: this is for example the case for this weekend. end of July 30 and 31, 2022, 40 years after the tragedy in Beaune.