As crews in Nebraska have learned, school bus safety features can actually hamper rescue efforts after an accident. On October 13, 2001, a school bus carrying 27 students and 3 chaperones from a band competition entered into a construction zone, and came upon another bus. Although there was no collision, the school bus veered to avoid the other bus, hitting the guardrail several times before breaking through. The bus then traveled up an embankment under a bridge, and rolled 270 degrees as it fell 49 feet into a creek. Four students died, and the other 23 plus chaperones had injuries ranging from minor to serious.
Many passengers were trapped inside the bus, and had to wait for rescue workers to come and help. When they arrived, they found that the same features such as reinforced frame, roof, and tightly packed seats didn’t allow the use of standard equipment like pickaxes and “the jaws of life.” Ultimately, they had to use hacksaws to remove parts of the bus, and thankfully there were no additional injuries caused by the delay. But especially considering that the bus came to rest in a creek, the results could have been a lot worse.
A similar school bus accident in Texas in 1989 caused the deaths of 21 students when their bus left the road and crashed into an excavation pit filled with water from a recent rainfall. Since the loading door at the front had been damaged during the accident and would not open, the only exit available to the 81 passengers and the bus driver was through the emergency back door of the bus. As a result, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) made 20 recommendations after their investigation – some of which may have helped prevent even more loss of life in the Nebraska accident twelve years later.
But the NHTSA found in this particular school bus accident that the rescue would have been done more efficiently if rescue crews had undergone “school bus extrication training.”
Taking the administration’s advice, several area crews worked with the Nebraska Emergency Medical Services program, Emergency Management Agency Region 15, the Nebraska Department of Roads and other county agencies to train specifically for this type of accident.
“All these people came together out of the goodness of their hearts on a Sunday afternoon to help make us a better EMS squad,” Barb Wilkinson, a member of Frontier County EMS, told The North Platte Telegraph. “An accident involving a school bus is something that can happen around here, with all the buses that run through the county,” she said.