FIRST TAKE


Too Many Questions, No Answers in Fatal Iowa Fire


WRITTEN BY RYAN GRAY | RYAN@STNONLINE.COM E


ven as the community in and around Oakland, Iowa buried high school student Megan Klindt and bus driver Donnie Hendricks last month, local residents, state and federal investigators


and the entire school bus industry is struggling with why. Te questions will continue no matter the findings of the National Transportation Safety Board, which was expected to release this month a preliminary report that shared basic findings from the fatal fire on Dec. 12, even though it will take at least another year for formal conclusions and recommendations to be made. Why, after reading so many heroic stories lately of school bus drivers evacuating busloads of students at the first sign of smoke, were Klindt, 16, and Hen- dricks, 74, unable to survive? Certainly, school bus fires are all too frequent occurrences, but with all cur- rent the evacuation training and safety advancements what went wrong? It all hit too close to home for Quinton Higgins, a school bus driver for Hardin County Schools in Kentucky, who is asking the very same question many are. Eight years ago, Higgins transitioned to a career in student transportation after surviving what is to this day the worst drunk-driving crash in U.S. history, and one of the school bus industry’s most seminal mo- ments. Higgins and 65 other passengers were actually riding on a converted school bus operated by a local church the evening of May 14, 1988, as they returned home from an outing at a Cincinnati amusement park Te crash led to several new industry safety standards such as protected fuel tanks and increased emergency evacuation exits. While there are still too many school bus fires,


Higgins and others saw the safety improvements as the big reason why there has been no loss of life in a school bus fire since Carrolton. “What in the world happened where they couldn’t get off that bus?” he rhetorically asked the day after the Iowa tragedy. “To have them not get off just blows my mind, and to die in a fire, that’s worse.” Higgins was one of the “lucky” ones in Carrolton. While 25 children suffered were killed, Higgins


12 School Transportation News • JANUARY 2018


suffered second- and third-degree burns to his hands and arms, which doctors surmise happened when he tried to shield his face and head from the flames. Tat was sometime before or after passing out following the crash. He said he recalled hitting the floor at some point after Larry Mahoney slammed his pickup truck into the nose of the bus on Interstate 71. Ten Higgins blacked out. “Somehow, I don’t have a memory of getting up, but I remember getting to the back and seeing the kids. I stuck my hands through (the rear emergency exit door) and a truck driver pulled me off,” he recalled. While 25 of his friends, the bus driver and an adult chaperone didn’t make it off the bus, Higgins and 42 others did, six of who were miraculously un- harmed, physically anyway. Meanwhile, Higgins spent the next six weeks in the


office recovering from his wounds, which included severely damaged lungs from the smoke and heat. But his story of survival makes it that much harder for him to understand what went so horribly wrong in Iowa, especially in today’s day and age of increased emergency evacuation training. Higgins has seen too many crashes in his day, but he is unable to reconcile in his mind what happened in Iowa. “I spoke to a lot of drivers after the fact,” he shared. “Te first thing we all said was that would’ve had to be something immediate for there to only be two people on that bus and for them to not get off. Te only other scenario is that gentleman had a med- ical something and the young girl tried to get him off and they just didn’t make it.”


As details trickle out in the months to come, there will certainly be more painful lessons learned. 


Ryan Gray, Editor-in-Chief


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