Ken Kesey's bus LOOKED like someone threw up on it...
Posted on 08/11/2010 1:30:00 PM PDT by a fool in paradise
As a school bus traveled down a Kankakee County road last December, its driver opened the door of the moving bus to vomit and then fell out — causing the bus full of school children to crash into a nearby ditch, a lawsuit claims.
The suit against Illinois Central School Bus was filed in Cook County Circuit Court Monday by a mother who claims her child was injured in the crash.
Akilah Giddings, mother of Jacqual Calbert, claims that the driver opened the door of the bus “in an attempt to lean over so he could barf” as the bus approached an intersection in Pembroke Township in rural Kankakee County.
The driver fell out and onto the road, while the bus carrying school children continued moving and crashed into a ditch, the suit claims. Calbert, a passenger on the bus, suffered an unspecified injury, the suit says. The suit does not say if anyone else was injured in the crash.
Illinois Central School Bus spokeswoman Diana Hallam declined to comment on the lawsuit, saying she has not reviewed it yet. She said safety is “a top priority.’’ The company, based in west suburban Montgomery, is the seventh largest school bus transportation business in the U.S., according to its website.
You forgot the “Barf alert”. :)
Ken Kesey's bus LOOKED like someone threw up on it...
ping.
Well...You know how I feel about school buses.
They are poorly designed. Poorly supervised. And...Many of the injuries and deaths are completely unavoidable.
Parents: Drive your own children to school and safely buckle them up in a properly fitted safety seat or belt.
Another job lost. zer0’s fault.
Typically when Big Brother runs things. Expect the same bureaucratic ineptitude and hand wringing ineffectualness with Obamacare.
Well...You know how I feel about school buses.
They are poorly designed. Poorly supervised. And...Many of the injuries and deaths are completely unavoidable.
Parents: Drive your own children to school and safely buckle them up in a properly fitted safety seat or belt.
Show me the stats that prove children are safer on a bus than driven by a **parent**, directly to and from school, and with the children are wearing seat belts.
You can't because they don't exist.
Next...You are likely able to find statistics showing that children are safer in a bus rather than being in a car ( with or without wearing seat belts),driven by **anyone**, at any time of the day. Of course this would include teens driving other teens ( we know how safe they are!).
Statistics like these aren't helpful to a parent trying to decide whether or not to allow their child to ride the bus.
Also...Emergency room physicians and surgeons across the nation will testify that of the 17,000 admission to hospital emergency rooms that many many many of these injuries ( and even deaths) would have been completely prevented by having seat restraints ( maybe similar to what is seen in amusement parks), better ( and often inexpensive) bus design, adult supervision in the back of the bus, and adult help with crossing the street.
Of course those 17,000 ER admissions do NOT include the visits to private physicians and dentists’ offices for more minor injuries.
Years ago, when my boys were little, one of them was carsick. So I was driving slow looking for a place to pull over.
The guy in back of me was not sympathetic to my plight. I was in the slow lane, but he was 2” from my bumper, yelling and giving me the bird.
My son, 5 years old, opened the window and vomited. Air speed being what it was, the guy’s windshield got a bath. Best way to stop a rude tailgater I ever found.
You might not believe that little factoid about there being 17,000 ER admissions ever year due to school bus accidents.
I challenge you to do a Google on the words: school bus 17,000 hospital.
Oh....And, remember that this is a nation whose government goes nuts if a ***private*** industry has 1 part per 100 BILLION of some chemical in some food.
But...Hey! We all know that if school buses were made safer there would be less money for the teachers and their unions.
Akilah is the mother of Jacqual?
So Akilah and Jacqual live in Kankakee?
What country did this happen in?
I think the bottom line here is that he should have puked on himself or the dash before endangering these kids. The kids safety IS his priority.
Kind of like being on the line of fire and a wasp flies down the back of your shirt. You don’t shoot everyone else because of a sting.
i guess the window right next to him was too hard to open...
Usually, it’s much more reliable to look at fatalities. Not just because they are worse than industry and more important to protect, but because they are recorded with much greater reliability than minor and major injuries.
But 17,000 ER admissions (which might not necessarily be for serious injuries) means that of the ~50,000,000 kids who are taking 350 annual rides each, that’s one ER visit per MILLION bus rides. Feel free to adjust numbers because not all kids ride the bus.
Some facts to chew on:
A fact sheet provided by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that 66 student deaths occurred as occupants on ALL school transportation vehicles, including those with restraints and without, between 1996 and 2006.
According to the Morning Call survey, one school bus driver and fifty-five pedestrians and riders in other vehicles have died since 2000, but no students on buses. That says a lot about the local Pennsylvania area.
School bus transportation is by far one of the safest methods of transportation, and the national track record associated with the daily transport of children proves just how safe it is. Driver training and bus construction both contribute.
With over 400,000 fatal accidents in the United States between 1996 and 2006, 0.33 percent were school transportation related, including ALL school vehicles.
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/252854
So if 0.33% of 400,000 fatal were school related, that’s 1320 school transportation fatalities in 10 years. Looking up a few paragraphs, we learn that 66 of these were on school buses. Thus, 95% of kids who are killed in crashes on the way to or from school are in the family car (or some vehicle other than a school bus, perhaps pedestrian fatalities hit by car are included as “school transportation.”
I’m sure that of the 19 kids on the way to school who die in the family car, a too-large portion were unbelted, or mom was tipsy. But most were probably just accidents.
And if I worried about child safety, I’d not be focusing on the incredibly safe mode of buses, and instead on other things (like overall road safety, etc.
But it is true that some are arguing that seatbelts would reduce injuries to kids on the bus. I’m not sure how well compliance would be, and how to address the range of child sizes, or if the investment would be justified compared to spending my tax dollars on other ways to improve safety (or letting parents keep more of their tax dollars to buy larger, safer cars with the extra money.
I also know that listening to ER docs for policy advice usually leads to bad decisions. Patching up limbs and gunshots does not make one an automotive safety engineer or a gun control expert.
I agree.
So?...The driver was irresponsible and, from the article, it appears the bus did a slow roll into a ditch. Would the child who was injured have been spared this injury if he had had a seat restraint ( maybe similar to those at amusement parks)?
Was this child sitting 3 to a seat as is often done? Was he throw into the aisle or bang his head and teeth into the seats in front on on the side of the bus?
Accidents happen. People will be irresponsible. That is why we have many of the safety features designs in cars that we and we are urged to wear seat belts.
The safety design of school buses could be greatly improved to help protect the children when the driver, or other drivers around them on the road, are not as alert, careful, or perfect as they could be.
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