We doubt that many parents place much stock in hoping that their children have a safe ride to and from school. Preferably, most parents would likely want to be assured by a consistent safety record of the bus drivers that work in their school district. Unfortunately, while a school system can more or less control the quality of the drivers they hire, other external factors affecting the safety of school kids riding in those buses can be much more random and have a sometimes dangerous effect on the number and frequency of traffic accidents involving those school buses.
It’s certainly a tragedy when any innocent child is hurt or killed in a mostly preventable accident. When that accident involves a loaded school bus, more than one child can be affected. As Maryland personal injury attorneys, our concern is for the victims and their families, especially in cases where negligence likely played a part in the confluence of such a roadway collision.
From time to time, we read of situations that place our most precious of resource — our children — in harm’s way. Whether an incident takes place here in the Baltimore area, over in Columbia, or even in Washington, D.C., a victim of a car, truck or motorcycle crash can face a long road back to full health. As injury lawyers, our job is to help victims and their families recover costs associated with a bad auto accident. Of course, recouping monetary costs may not help heal the emotional and psychological scars, but it can go a long way to easing the burden on a family whose world has been turned upside down by a traffic wreck.
As we said, accidents involving school buses can injure more than one person. A story we ran into the other day should remind everyone that bad things can happen out of the blue. Being prepared for tragedy doesn’t always prepare one for the ultimate loss, however. According to a news article, a tractor-trailer smashed into a school bus carrying more than two dozen pupils from the Turkeyfoot Valley Area School District just north of the Maryland-Penna. border.
The crash took place a little before 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon. At that time an 18-wheeler big rig truck hit the bus head-on killing the 31-year-old trucker and injuring 22 others aboard the school bus. Based on reports, the head-on traffic wreck took place on a stretch of Rte 281 in Pennsylvania.
In the aftermath of the crash, two adults and three children were apparently critically injured, having been airlifted to the nearby Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown. Three additional kids were taken by medevac to emergency rooms in Pittsburgh and Cumberland, MD. The driver of the school bus
The driver of the school bus was hurt so badly that surgery was apparently required to save the driver’s life. No mention was made regarding the condition of the second adult riding on the bus. A number of students were apparently treated at the scene and then released to their parents, while six additional students were transported by ambulance to Somerset Hospital.
Police reports suggest that the northbound tractor-trailer crossed the centerline before it stuck the bus. There was no mention of whether the cause could have been driver error or a mechanical problem with the semi. An investigating was still ongoing at the time of the news article.
Tractor-trailer collides with school bus, 1 dead, several injured; Tribune-Democrat.com, March 15, 2012