WESTPORT - They were dozing. Or reading, or looking out the window as twilight settled over the eastern edge of New York's Adirondack Mountains. Then they heard the harsh sound of tires as the bus driver suddenly struggled at the wheel.

The Greyhound flipped three times, said one passenger. Another said four. As he tossed among the seats, Christian Yopa said he thought of death for the first time. Five people around him were killed, including the driver, who was buried so deeply inside the smashed cabin that he wasn't removed until the morning.

Josee Renaud woke up on the bus' ceiling. Some woke up in the grass.

“I couldn't see who was dead and who was not,” Yopa said.

Many were shocked into silence. And as officials gathered around the smashed remains of the New York-to-Montreal bus Tuesday, a day after the crash, they said it was amazing others didn't die.

Still, 19 of the 53 passengers, many of them Canadians, remained hospitalized Tuesday. Police said a front bus tire apparently failed. Dazed survivors gathered in hotel lobbies Tuesday, some still in hospital clothes. Renaud, 49, of Quebec, looked at photos of the crash splashed across a copy of the local newspaper in her hotel lobby and shook her head.

“I don't remember,” she said.

This is what police said happened:

The Greyhound was northbound, 110 miles north of Albany at 6:45 on a dry, overcast evening when Ronald Burgess, the 52-year-old from Long Island who was driving the bus, started passing a tractor-trailer. The trucker, who was in the right lane, told police he heard a noise and looked to his left.

“It appeared to him that one of the tires had failed on the front end of the bus,” said State Police Major Richard C. Smith Jr.

The 55-seat bus veered off the road, went over the guard rail and flipped into the grassy median of Interstate 87.

Burgess and four others died: A 16-year-old boy from Montreal, Tambadou Souleymane; 81-year-old Antonide Dorce of Hempstead; and two Canadians whose names police did not immediately release so they could contact their families.

Those hospitalized included one person listed in critical condition and 11 others sent to hospitals offering higher-level care in Montreal and Burlington, Vt. Others were hospitalized in New York state.

Burgess' trapped body was removed Tuesday morning, and the bus was taken from the scene. Emergency officials said several people were thrown out of the bus. The bus did not have seat belts, except for the driver.

On Tuesday, passengers said they remembered a loud sound from the tires and then cartwheeling as the bus flipped and landed on its roof.

“The driver tried to keep us on the street,” said Yopa, 28, of Germany, who was going to visit his mother in Montreal. “But a few seconds later, boom, it was too late.” He opened his eyes and called for his wife, who was OK. Then he helped lift debris off a female passenger and escaped out a window, one of his right fingers broken.

Rob Kaplan of Long Island, a second-year student at Concordia University, had been on his way back to the college in Montreal.

“I was asleep when the bus started skidding for no reason. It was the most terrible thing I've ever experienced,” he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., his right eye swollen shut.

“We flipped over like four times and I was knocked out,” he said. “People had injuries so much worse than mine.”

Police showed reporters the bus Tuesday afternoon at a state garage. The front roof was smashed in. It looked as though the front end had been pinched by giant fingers. Along the driver's side, seats tipped out of glassless window frames.

Bus No. 4014 left New York at 1 p.m., made stops in Albany and Saratoga Springs and was about an hour south of the Canadian border when it crashed, said Greyhound spokeswoman Anna Folmnsbee.

Burgess had driven for Greyhound since 1999 and, like all Greyhound drivers, completed a seven-week training course that included driving in adverse and crisis conditions, said Folmnsbee. She declined to release details about Burgess' driving record, citing confidentiality rules. Folmnsbee could not immediately say how often a driver must be recertified.

Each driver, who must log 100 training hours before driving for Greyhound, is required to inspect the interior, exterior and major mechanical systems on their bus before and after every trip, Folmnsbee said.

Vivian Davis, a neighbor of Burgess' mother Margaret, remembered a “very nice, amiable young man” who came by regularly to visit his mother, helping around the house.

“He always had a smile on his face,” she said.

When she told Davis about her son's death, Margaret Burgess she was “just, just numb, like all the feelings had gone out of her,” Davis said. “All she could say was, ‘The Lord came and took my son. I never thought that he would leave me. I thought that I would leave him.”'

Burgess was a bus driver most of his adult life - in New York City and in Suffolk County before going to work for Greyhound, his uncle John Fluitt said. He leaves behind a wife and two grown sons.

“He was the jolly kind, happy-go-lucky type of guy, very happy all the time,” Fluitt said. “When I first saw it on television - I know he usually goes that route - and I say it to myself, ‘I hope it wasn't him.”'

The bus, a model DL-3, entered service in September 1999 and passed its annual Federal Department of Transportation inspection last week, Folmnsbee said. The bus was introduced in 1998 as the vehicle with the most seats in Greyhound's fleet.

NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said the agency was “monitoring” the incident but had not yet decided whether to launch an investigation. The Federal Motor Carrier Agency also was notified about the accident and expected to investigate, Smith said.

Many of the victims spoke French, making it difficult to identify everyone on the bus, Smith said. One of them was Renaud, on her way home after visiting her fiance in New York. “When the shock happened, maybe I lost my conscience - my consciousness,” she said in a mixture of French and English. “When I woke, two men were helping me out of the bus. It was like a bad dream.” Her right arm was in a sling.

The passengers ranged in age from an infant to the 81-year-old victim, Dorce.

“I'm frankly amazed more people were not more seriously injured,” said Champlain Valley Hospital spokesman Mike Hildebran.

The highway linking New York City and Montreal reopened shortly before 9 a.m., troopers said.

Yopa said that in the hours after the crash, a Greyhound representative offered to put him on a bus to continue to Montreal.

“My God!” a bruised Yopa said, sitting in a hotel lobby in a hospital robe. “What an idea!”