Yellow Coffins
Plain Dealer – March 3, 1993
SERIES: DEADLY DELAYS
RED TAPE COSTS LIVES
(Part Four of a five-part series)
by Keith C. Epstein
Plain Dealer Reporter
ALTON, TEXAS
Some students dozed, a few flirted and others giggled as the school bus rumbled through the desolate back roads of this poor migrant community near the Mexican border.
In her seat, 16-year-old Francelio Rubio struggled to finish her geometry assignment. Nearby, freshman Eduardo Vasquez napped, his knees propped against the seat in front of him.
Suddenly, a truck rammed into the bus, scattering Rubio’s geometry homework and jarring Eduardo awake. Francelio shut her eyes tightly, thinking we’re all going to die.
The bus hurtled off the road into a deep gravel pit. It bobbed only briefly, then quickly sank. The murky water rushing into the bus muffled the cries of the 81 children trapped inside.
They pushed and clawed at the windows. Outside, frantic rescuers couldn’t break the glass. Jammed, the front door was of no use. Near the back exit, Eduardo clambered to safety. Francelio’s brother pulled her through the exit with him.
Then Eduardo dived back, again and again, in a vain search for his 12-year-old brother, Alberto.
There were only bubbles.
Later, Alberto’s body would be found inside, along with the others, toward the center and front of the bus, too far from the one emergency exit at the back of the bus, standard on U.S. school buses.
Altogether, 21 bodies would be counted, their limbs and skin and muscles intact. All had drowned.
National Transportation Safety Board officials concluded: “None of the fatally injured students received … injuries that would have prevented them from escaping.”
What prevented them from escaping was the lack of a simple, $216 emergency exit on the left side of the bus.
Some of the lawsuits clogging the courthouse here blame the driver of the delivery truck, others the truck’s owner or the bus manufacturer. “Maybe,” muses Francelio, “it was just destiny.”
More likely it was the federal government’s failure to require another emergency exit, despite two decades of accidents and warnings from researchers, safety officials and even bus manufacturers that just such a tragedy would recur.
While a third door is no guarantee of survival, another emergency exit would have significantly increased the children’s chances. The government’s failure to require it is another example of the risk to Americans caused by bureaucratic delay.
There had been a grave reminder of the need for another exit only 16 months before the Texas tragedy, when in May 1988 a pickup truck rammed a church bus near Carrollton, Ky., puncturing the fuel tank.
With the bus in flames, the passengers, mostly screaming children, scrambled to reach a single emergency exit at the rear. Many succumbed to poisonous smoke first. Twenty-seven people died.
“Had the passengers been able to escape from more than just two windows,” concluded the National Transportation Safety Board, “it is very likely that more passengers would have survived.”
For weeks, television viewers had seen it on the nightly news. Congressmen had exploited it during hearings. A newspaper’s extensive coverage of the disaster eventually won the Pulitzer Prize.
Yet for all the publicity, the national attention, the vows that Carrollton would be the last accident of its kind – for all that, it happened again, in Alton.
Modern school buses are among the safest means of transport. Each day, 380,000 of the familiar yellow vehicles ferry 22.6 million kids over 18 million miles. On average, 28,000 crash each year; remarkably only 14 occupants are killed. The family car is four times more deadly.
But experts have learned that when bus accidents do occur, passengers are easily trapped. Worse, one of the exits – front or rear – usually jams. Buses tend to roll over on their sides, making escape through the front door impossible.
“There’s no way when you take a large bus with 85 kids that they’ll get out with just a front door and a rear door, and even kickout windows aren’t enough,” said Larry Jackson, a safety board highway expert. “And what school practices emergency evacuation? It’s not like it’s a Boeing 747, where you see a video of emergency procedures. Joe Kid has never even seen a pushout window.”
Fearing such problems on buses more than two decades ago, the federal government in 1974 required extra emergency exits on inter-city commercial buses like those used by Greyhound. The rules were tightened in 1985. But school buses were exempted both times.
The reason for not giving children the same standard for safety: possible “discipline problems.” Boys and girls might interfere with the driver. Regulators also feared the “risk of children falling” from exits while the bus was moving.
Two fatal accidents in commercial buses in 1968 underscored the problem. Nineteen died in a Greyhound that caught fire after a collision in Baker, Calif. The safety board said most died for lack of adequate exits. A charter bus crash near Beaver Falls, Pa., killed three but, the safety board said, the toll would have been higher if a fire had broken out.
Studies began in December 1970. University of Oklahoma researchers staging mock accidents in school buses found it often took too long for children to flee.
Raising “serious questions about … escape-worthiness of school buses” with only pushout windows or rear emergency exits, the research explicitly urged better “escape performance with the bus on its side.” A Baylor University study also warned of the peril, suggesting roof hatches.
Nearly 15 years before the tragedy here in Texas, the safety board had urged better emergency exits four times. Still, regulators refused to budge. Eventually, they agreed to require side exits in city buses – but not school buses.
The Center for Auto Safety criticized the federal government for “ignoring all the research.”
In 1980 – eight years before the fiery tragedy in Kentucky – a study for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration acknowledged the flaws in relying on the rear exit and windshield in emergencies. The researchers warned: Existing evacuation standards “do not guarantee a satisfactory design against a fire hazard.”
Hermanville, Miss. December 1981: The driver of a Head Start van, ferrying 32 preschoolers to a Christmas party, lost control, careening off a bridge. The bus fell into a creek, landing on its right side.
Rescuers smashed windows, grabbing as many children as they could reach.
Dead: four preschoolers and a teacher’s aide.
“Contributing to the loss of life,” concluded the safety board: “limited availability of exits.”
Bowling Green, O., March 1988: A student in a wheelchair dies when her bus overturns. Unable to reach the only escape exit, at the back of the bus, she is helpless. Rescuers fail to reach her in time. She dies of her injuries.
Three months later at Carrollton, the pickup truck rammed into the church activity bus returning on Interstate 71 from Kings Island amusement park near Cincinnati. A witness recalled the screaming children “packed in the door, all trying to get out at once” through a single exit at the rear, 56 inches high and 36 inches wide. With another exit, concluded the safety board, “more passengers would have survived.”
After Carrollton, the safety board re-examined 10 bus accidents, confirming what it already knew: The double standard between school and commercial buses was costing lives.
So the safety board again urged that more exits be required, perhaps determined by the size of the bus – but certainly “no fewer than those required for non-school buses” two decades earlier.
Four months after Carrollton, the Louisville Courier-Journal called attention to the “relentless drumbeat of … recommendations” that had been ignored for years.
Finally, four months later, reform seemed likely when the highway agency for the first time acknowledged additional exits “may have reduced the number of deaths and injuries” at Carrollton.
Moreover, regulators promised to think about how to “enhance the efficiency of school bus evacuation/escape.”
It turned out to be mostly talk.
Late in 1989, the highway agency formally announced it might require more emergency exits. What the agency meant was it would survey public opinion.
Pleased, the safety board accepted this as “beginning steps.”
In another month, the 21 children in the Texas gravel pit sank to their doom, “caught inside a metal box,” as Francelio Rubio put it.
A month after the tragedy, the safety board focused on seven accidents in which the doors of small buses jammed. Predictably, it reached the same conclusion: Not enough exits. The safety board finds the need is greater on smaller buses, where exits are more likely to jam, and whose occupants are the most difficult to rescue – preschoolers and the disabled.
Eight months after the Texas accident, a safety conference of the nation’s local and state school transportation officials joined the chorus, urging that mid-size buses have an additional exit on each side, and a roof hatch.
Finally, in March 1991, the highway agency proposed extra emergency exits for full-size school buses. “School bus safety might be enhanced,” the agency said.
Estimated cost: $216 for a side door.
In November 1992 – three years after the Texas tragedy, and more than four years since Carrollton, Ky. – the agency published the final rule. A more thorough government analysis put the price tag at $557.
The rule won’t take effect until May 1994 at the earliest. Even then, the federal government will require left-side exits only on the largest school buses, and only on new ones.
School districts can’t be expected to replace entire fleets. Thus, at best, by the following year only one in 10 school buses will have the extra exit.
——————
Deadly Delays: Bureaucracy is Killing Us
Long after wreckage is examined for clues, causes determined, and solutions urged – thousands of Americans still risk death or injury in similar accidents because the causes weren’t fixed. (The Plain Dealer)
Ice on Jets – Recurring Risk, Tolerated for Years – Despite pinpointing causes of multiple commercial airliner crashes, Washington does nothing to require simple, proven remedies advocated for years
Flight 405: The Story of Four Passengers- Strangers on a plane, going about the routine business of flying, trusted that commercial aviation had become as safe as airlines and the government could make it. They were wrong.
While Grownups Squabbled, Children Died – Battles between automakers and regulators for more than a decade stalled development of safer child seats.
Feds Shrug Off a Life-Saver for Commuter Planes – Commuter airline flights crashed repeatedly into the ground for lack of a simple device urged for years by federal safety officials. The FAA declined. Planes kept crashing.
Cessnas Crash, but Agencies Do Nothing - For decades, Cessnas chocked from a carburetor flaw known to the manufacturer and the government. Yet pilots had never heard of the problem, and the government required no fix.
Safety Board Has No Teeth – The National Transportation Safety Board is widely known for investigating accidents. What many people don’t realize is that it’s powerless – a toothless tiger.
