Tragic bus fire may prompt new safety rules

The fire extinguishers required on buses can’t put out tire fires like the one that killed 23 nursing home patients fleeing Hurricane Rita on Sept. 23, federal safety officials were told yesterday.

The National Transportation Safety Board was exploring how the fire, which started in the vehicle’s right wheel well, spread so fast and may have caused some patients’ oxygen canisters to explode.

Flames quickly engulfed the bus, which was carrying 44 people and a driver. It was evacuating patients from Brighton Gardens Nursing Home in Bellaire, an enclave of Houston, and taking them to a site in Dallas owned by the same company, Sunrise Senior Living.

Texas officials had ordered the Gulf Coast evacuated as Rita approached.

NTSB member Kitty Higgins, who chaired the two-day hearing into the accident, questioned why the federal government requires motor coaches to carry a 5-pound fire extinguisher, which is ineffective against tire fires.

A 5-pound fire extinguisher is about 15 inches tall and carries 5 pounds of chemical agent.

“I have a 5-pound fire extinguisher in my kitchen,” Higgins said. “That’s not a real big piece of firefighting equipment.”

The problem, witnesses said, is that there isn’t much that’s effective in a tire fire.

“Once a tire catches fire, it’s hopeless,” said Larry Plachno, publisher of National Bus Trader, a motorcoach trade publication.

Six buses catch fire on an average day in the United States, according to Marty Ahrens of the National Fire Protection Association. That estimate includes all kinds of buses, including school and inner-city transit buses.

Fires that originate in overheated engines or other parts of a bus are easier to suppress than tire fires, which burn very hot and can ignite on both the inside and outside.

They are rarely fatal, though, because passengers usually can evacuate in time, the NTSB was told.

“If that motor coach in Wilmer, Texas, was occupied by 43 or 53 young, physically able people, we would not be here today,” said Paul Ford, a safety manager for Delaware Transit Corp.

The difficulty in evacuating fragile, immobile people from a motor coach was described by two witnesses who tried to rescue the passengers from the burning bus in Texas.

Jason Saulsbury and Drew Wood said they were driving to work when they saw a small fire in the back of the bus. When they saw the passengers still on the bus, they stopped to help.

“We started pulling them off,” said Wood. “It didn’t take long to be engulfed in black, thick smoke.”

Wood and Saulsbury tried to break open the bus windows, with little success. Wood said he couldn’t manage to get a woman out of the window, so he went around to the front.

“That was when everything started blowing up,” he said.

Ford, who drills with first responders on evacuating disabled people, said motor coaches may simply be inappropriate for transporting immobile passengers.

With a new hurricane season now under way, investigators want to know how decisions are made about transporting frail people when they’re ordered to evacuate, Higgins said.