The driver of a charter bus carrying Houston middle school students will not be cited after the vehicle blew a tire and caught fire Sunday on a bridge near Lake Charles, La.
“He had a flat tire and he was trying to ride it off the bridge to get to a safe location, and it caught fire,” said Sgt. James Anderson of the Louisiana State Police. “There are no charges that are going to be filed against him at this time.”
The bus was returning to Houston from Walt Disney World in Florida, where students from Houston's Pershing Middle School had won first place in a national band competition. The 25 students and seven chaperones on board escaped uninjured, but flames destroyed the vehicle and all of the passengers' belongings, including the students' instruments.
The bus is owned and operated by Gulf Coast Transportation, a Houston-based subsidiary of Coach America, which bought out Coach USA's business in this region in 2003.
The bus driver — identified by police as a 64-year-old man from Livingston — has worked for Gulf Coast Transportation for more than four years, said Rich Funke, managing director of Texas for Coach America.
“He's got a very good safety record. No issues or accidents,” Funke said.
Coach America will investigate Sunday's incident, but Funke said the driver apparently “did exactly what he was supposed to do” and followed safety protocol.
“Evidently, he was coming through the construction area and as he was coming up the bridge, supposedly there was a tire blowout and there was not a safe place for him to pull off because there was no shoulder,” Funke said. “So he had to go another couple hundred yards … He put the four ways on and continued on to where he could pull over to a safe place where he could allow people to get off the bus.”
Quick evacuation
Funke said the driver got the passengers off the bus as quickly as possible and moved them away from the bus. He then tried and failed to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher.
“There was a lot of air and wind, and it just fueled the fire,” Funke said.
Funke said the driver is upset and has asked for a couple days off. “He's going to go through a retraining process” before heading back to work, he said.
Coach America operates charter buses for road trips for several school districts across the state, Funke said. HISD has written 147 checks totaling more than $761,000 to Coach America since May 1, 2009, district records show.
Gulf Coast Transportation vehicles have been involved in seven accidents in the past 30 months, according to records from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Seven people were injured and no one was killed. One driver was cited in one accident on Katy Freeway in June 2008. The company has a satisfactory safety rating.
Coach America is working with HISD and individual passengers to find out what they lost in the fire so the company can reimburse them, Funke said.
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