For a few moments on a jam-packed Vancouver bus, it looked like a scene from a horror movie.
One man had his smartphone recording as thick, red fluid gushed from the ceiling of a 99 B-Line bus last week, to the shock of passengers.
“Someone was sitting in one of the seats underneath where it started dripping, and I think some of it dropped on him so he moved,” said Luka, who declined to give his last name. “I looked up to the ceiling and the walls and it just looked like a scene from The Shining.”
The fluid can be seen dripping from the ceiling and down the walls in the video, forming a large puddle in the middle of the articulated bus.
Smelling a chemical odour, Luka and other passengers can be heard yelling at the driver to pull over.
“It’s flammable possibly, it could be blood!” one person shouts, jokingly.
Every passenger exited the bus when it pulled over, Luka said.
On Tuesday, TransLink apologized to passengers for the bizarre incident, and confirmed that the mysterious red substance leaking from the bus Thursday was in fact hydraulic fluid.
The company said the fluid is not considered flammable but can cause irritaiton to the skin and eyes and be toxic if swallowed, though no one was injured.
“The bus was safely parked and then towed back to the garage,” it said in a statement. “TransLink takes all leaks very serious. All incidents are promptly and thoroughly investigated.”
The bus was back in service after a two-hour repair, the company said.
It added that the vehicle’s steering mechanism was not impacted by the leak, and passengers were not in danger at any time.
