INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS
NEWS BRIEFS
Two devastating tornados that hit the Oklahoma City, Okla., area in the span of 11 days in May caused widespread damage in addition to killing 43 people, one of whom was a local, retired man who was a volunteer school-bus driver.
OKLAHOMA CITIES RECOVERING, REBUILDING AFTER TWO DEADLY TORNADOES Days after an EF5 tornado
devastated the community of Moore on May 20, a second tornado pummeled the El Reno, Okla., area and took the life of a school bus driver. William O’Ne- al, 67, was a substitute driver who volunteered for the Maple Public School district in Calumet, located about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City. Tat May 31 tornado, also an
EF5, was 2.6 miles wide — the widest on record — and hit during rush hour. Superintendent Art Eccard
told STN that O’Neal was driv- ing north on Highway 81 from his home in Union City to El Reno when the tornado flipped his car six times. O’Neal served in the Air Force in Vietnam and was a retired federal corrections officer at the medium-security fa-
cility in El Reno. He had driven for Maple Public School for the past five years. Eccard added that “Billy,” as
O’Neal was called, particularly liked to drive his grandson’s field trips. Trent Gibson, director of student transportation at the Oklahoma State Department of Education, said that several school bus drivers also lost their homes, or much of them, in both tornadoes. “I know that six homes of bus
drivers were destroyed in the May 20 tornado,” Gibson told STN. “Also, in the (May 31) tornado, one bus driver from El Reno lost much of his home.” One week after the El Reno
tornado, the Oklahoma medical ex- aminer reported the death toll at 20. While the May 20 tornado
narrowly missed the Moore Pub- lic Schools’ bus facility, Gibson
22 School Transportation News July 2013
said that communication into and out of the affected area was “a very big problem” afterward because of damage to the school district’s technology center. He added that the bus facility was in the general path of the 2-mile- wide tornado that officially killed 23 people and injured at least another 350. Two elementary schools were destroyed, and news outlets reported that nearly half of the fatalities were children from one of the schools. As a result, Gibson said the
school district, the third largest in the state, would not finish the current school year so it can prepare for next year. Meanwhile, IC Bus LLC, a subsidiary of Navistar, Inc., donated an RE Series school bus to Moore that was also filled with supplies. It also made a
$10,000 contribution to Moore Public Schools to assist in the district’s recovery efforts. Navis- tar employees across the globe donated $8,000 to the American Red Cross. “We understand our donations
today will never replace the lives that were lost or even come close to making up for the tragedy suffered by the Moore commu- nity,” said Suk Singh, director of manufacturing, IC Bus. “But it is our hope the bus and our donations will serve as a sign that we care about our customers, and that Moore, along with the rest of the state, will recover.” Bus contractor Durham
School Services also collected donations across the Midwest in the days following the Moore tornado and delivered them to the affected area in school buses.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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