By Leslie Miller
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A bus explosion that killed 23 nursing home patients fleeing Hurricane Rita was due in part to flawed government oversight of bus companies, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded Wednesday.
A rear wheel of the bus caught fire in the early morning of Sept. 23, 2005, on a freeway near Dallas. Within minutes the vehicle was engulfed in flames and smoke.
While the safety board ruled that lack of oil in a wheel assembly probably caused the fire, it said the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration was also responsible because it had done a poor job of making sure bus companies were safe.
The safety board also blamed the bus company, Global Limo Inc., because it didn’t conduct preventive maintenance, require drivers to inspect the vehicles or keep inspection records.
“We’ve got an operator who violated every rule in the book and yet was allowed to continue to operate under the current state and federal scheme,” said NTSB member Kitty Higgins.
The board concluded that the bus’s wheel hub had no oil in it, causing the wheel bearings to fail, which in turn created friction and heat.
Daily inspections, recommended by the bus manufacturer, would have revealed the lack of lubricant. The driver didn’t inspect the bus, investigators said.
Saying the bus company, Global Limo Inc., was a hazard to the public, federal regulators shut it down weeks after the accident. Global Limo’s owner James Maples was convicted in October of maintenance and inspection charges _ poorly managing his fleet and not requiring drivers to fill out vehicle inspection reports.
Though the bus company hadn’t met government safety standards, an inspection three months before the accident gave it a satisfactory rating.
Investigators said the reason the government didn’t shut the company down then was that the rating system gives too little weight to the most serious safety violations.
NTSB member Debbie Hersman said federal regulators aren’t catching shoddy bus companies that should be shut down.
“Only a fraction of carriers ever get audited,” Hersman said. “Only a fraction get an unsatisfactory rating and only a fraction of those carriers get put out of business.”
The NTSB recommended that FMCSA shut down bus companies that put unsafe vehicles on the road or have unqualified drivers behind the wheel.
Hersman also chastised FMCSA for doing little to make sure commercial drivers speak and read English, which they’re required to do.
The driver of the bus that exploded was an illegal immigrant who didn’t speak English, investigators said. Hersman said that meant the driver couldn’t tell a passenger calling 911 where they were and couldn’t read the manual that recommended daily inspections of the oil in the hub.
Victims and relatives of victims in May reached an $11 million settlement with Global Limo and BusBank, the travel broker that hired it.
The fire probably caused the patients’ oxygen canisters to explode, making it even harder to evacuate them from the bus, investigators said.
Since the accident, the Transportation Department has issued new guidelines for carrying medical oxygen, recommending that tanks be secured in an upright position and limited to one canister per patient in the passenger compartment.