By now, you ought to know this routine by heart. At 3:50 PM yesterday, a bus filled with high school students crashed and rolled on its side, this time in Colorado. Five students sustained critical injuries, and everybody else on the bus was bloodied and injured and taken to area hospitals. When are we going to require 3-point seat belts on busses?
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A tour bus had originated in Burnsville, a suburb located about ten miles south of Minneapolis. It was filled with students and adult chaperones, and was on its way to Christian camp at Frontier Ranch in Colorado. Fifty miles southwest of Denver, on US Highway 285, at Kenosha Pass, the bus started to go too fast. Maybe the brakes went bad. Maybe the driver had dozed off. Who knows? When the bus started to fish-tail, the kids didn't have a prayer.
It very well could be that the driver, being from Minnesota, was not acclimated to thin mountain air, and passed out from the high altitude, but he'd probably never admit to it. Kenosha Pass has an elevation of 10,001 feet.
I'm from Buffalo Grove, Illinois, elevation 692 feet. I know that when I drive through mountain passes in Colorado, I get pretty dizzy and have to pull off the road to stop for a while to recover. Perhaps the driver wasn't about to let on that he was having a problem staying conscious, out of concern that the passengers would get scared and demand that this guy be fired and replaced by a different driver.
When the bus rolled over, all of their bibles, rosary beads and crucifixes didn't protect them from injury. Three-point seat belts, however, would have protected them. Bibles, rosary beads and crucifixes but no seat belts results in everybody getting injured, some critically and sometimes fatally. Three-point seat belts but no religious bric-a-brac results in uninjured passengers who walk away from the roll-over accident, thinking that it was some god that protected them, when in reality it was 3-point seat belts.
Here are two KCNC television station photos of the crash, from a CNN story about the crash.
Notice how, as usual, the bus is essentially intact. It's not crushed or crumpled, so the injuries were the result, as usual, of passengers being catapulted through the bus and/or being ejected. Nobody would have been hurt seriously had everybody been wearing 3-PSB's, and those who were hurt would probably have sustained only minor cuts or scrapes from flying broken window glass or flying objects, such as bibles or CD players that were playing religious music, that were loose in the cabin, but not the flying bodies of people.
Here are a couple of quotes from today's Denver Post story about the bus crash:
Some of the passengers "were bad. They were borderline," said Jefferson-Como firefighter Matt Anderson, one of the first at the crash scene in Park County.
The passengers' injuries ranged from life-threatening to those hurt but able to walk, Elk Creek Fire Chief Bill Dolan said. "The ones we had weren't seat-belted, so they were ejected into the road. They came out the window."
Here are links to stories by other major news organizations about yesterday's bus crash: CNN Rocky Mountain News Here are un-edited, back-up, library/archive copies of these stories only in the event that the above links expire: Denver Post story CNN story Rocky Mountain News story.
The next time you ride a bus, don't ask if it has a bible in each of the seat backs or a crucifix affixed to the front wall above the windshield. Those things are not going to protect you in a roll-over. The placebo effect of those things might make you believe that you will be protected from experiencing a roll-over, but they won't protect you when the roll-over actually occurs. What you need during a roll-over is a 3-point seat belt, not religious fantasy.
If the bus doesn't have a 3-point seat belt, don't ride on it.
If enough people refuse to ride busses that don't have 3-point seat belts, then bus companies will install seats with 3-point seat belts.
It's all about profit, not safety. If you're willing to ride without 3-PSBs, they're not going to spend the money to put them in. If, on the other hand, people stop riding busses that don't have 3-PSBs, you can be sure that busses will be retrofitted as fast as they can get their hands on them.
Compartmentalization doesn't help you one iota in a roll-over or side-impact crash. If you don't believe me, just ask those nice Christian kids from Minnesota who were critically injured when their bus that crashed, yesterday, in Colorado. Or the 46 kids from Massey Hill High School in Fayetteville, North Carolina, all of whom were injured when their bus rolled over in Georgia, a mile north of the Florida line, on April 6th when their driver fell asleep at the wheel. Or the parents of the dead kids from Mountainburg, Arkansas, whose bus was broad-sided by a semi on May 31st. Or the parents of the dead kids from Oak Hill Middle School in Newton, Massachusetts, when their bus driver missed a curve in New Brunswick on April 27th and the bus rolled over.
Be obstreperous.
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