We’re learning more about what may have caused a school bus crash in Jefferson County that injured about three dozen students. The bus crashed on Interstate 64 near the Jefferson-Shelby County line, and it was caught on camera.
The high school students were coming back from a trip to Eastern Kentucky University. Police say on the way back, the bus may have blown a tire before crashing into the median.
Thirty-six juniors and seniors at Louisville’s Waggener High School had just spent the day visitng EKU. Dashboard camera from a semi-truck shows the exact time everything changed. At 1:37 pm, the school bus veered to the left across three lanes of interstate traffic before crashing into a concrete median, leaving behind a cloud of smashed concrete.
http://liarcatchers.com/accident_reconstruction.html
“She was going probably about 60 miles an hour and blew a front tire,” says the truck driver who witnessed the crash.
Amidst the sea of stretchers and bookbags, in all thirty students and four adults, including the driver, were taken to area hospitals.
“We have some broken bones. It seems several people are complaining of some jaw problems so my suspicion is probably their face hit a seat, broke a jaw,” explained Dr. Glen Franklin with the University of Louisville’s Trauma Center.
Dr. Franklin says the wounded are in satisfactory to fair conditions as of Tuesday night. Earlier they underwent X-rays, and were put in contact with their families.
Lettering on the bus indicates it belongs to Commonwealth Bus Service of Louisville.
Some students will be spending the night in the hospital after this long day.
The school trip is one in which high school juniors and seniors get to visit area colleges. A school official said in a statement that she was deeply saddened that a trip that was supposed to expose kids to the college experience ended in an accident.
