Bus With Elderly Evacuees On Board Catches Fire; 24 Killed

By Maria L. La Ganga, Times Staff Writer


They were Hurricane Rita's first victims. They died before the massive gulf storm even made landfall.

A bus evacuating "extremely frail and elderly people" from a nursing home caught fire on a freeway near Dallas this morning. Twenty four died in the blaze, which was stoked by exploding oxygen canisters that many of the patients used to breathe.

All were older than 80, according to a sheriff's spokesman, who said rescuers were barred by the flames from immediately rescuing those trapped inside the vehicle.

Sgt. Don Peritz, spokesman for the Dallas Sheriff's Department, said the rescuers could not find the words to describe the horror that they witnessed.

"It was a very grim task at the very least," Peritz said. "At the onset they [the deputies] were very frustrated that they were unable to board the bus and get people off. I talked to the three deputies who were first responders."

"They were physically shaken," Peritz said. "I can't find an adequate word to explain the look on these guys faces when they were telling me the story.

"Because of the fast speed of the fire and the heat generated by the oxygen bottles, it made it hard to even see into the bus, let alone get into it to get them out," Peritz said.

Peritz said 38 patients in their 80s and 90s from the Brighton Gardens assisted living facility in Bellaire, near Houston, were on board, along with five staff members, the mother of one staff member and the driver. They were fleeing Hurricane Rita, heading for a nursing home in the Dallas area.

Meghan Lublin, a spokeswoman for Sunrise Senior Living, the McLean, Va.-based company that owns Brighton Gardens, said that two chartered buses left the facility at 2 p.m. Thursday after officials decided to evacuate residents. Some of the patients on the bus were ambulatory and some were not.

"Its a very difficult day for all of us," Lublin said. "We are experiencing a major loss. We're in the process of notifying all of the family members. We have been placing calls all day to the appropriate people."

The bus driver survived the inferno, helping to rescue the elderly passengers from the blazing bus.

Peritz said several 911 calls came in starting at 6:07 a.m., reporting that a bus on Interstate 45 was on fire and that the fire appeared to be coming from one of the wheel wells.

Police arrived two minutes later to find the bus engulfed in flames. Some passengers were lying on the shoulder of the roadway, Peritz said, as deputies tried to enter the bus.

"They were driven back by the intense flames and very thick smoke and several explosions on board the bus," Peritz said. "Those were oxygen canisters on board the bus."

Interstate 45, which had been choked with evacuees fleeing north from Houston and other low-lying regions, was shut down for four hours. Peritz estimated that the backup caused by the accident stretched for 200 miles. Dallas — a major destination for many evacuees — is 234 miles north of Houston.

In an effort to get the evacuees to their destinations before Hurricane Rita hit, the Sheriff's Department consulted with homeland security officials and the Texas Department of Public Safety and decided to take the unprecedented step of removing the bus from the accident scene with the bodies of the dead still aboard before the investigation was complete.

"We needed to move the bus with the perished souls on board to a remote location," Peritz said. "We needed to open the freeway as soon as possible. It's the first time I'm aware of" that such a decision was made.

The bus was moved to the district headquarters of a government agency about five miles from the accident scene. The Dallas medical examiner and his staff were removing the dead from the bus.

Once that grim task has been completed, the National Transportation Safety Board, Texas state and Dallas sheriff's deputies will begin investigating the fire, inspecting the bus and talking with witnesses who were on the doomed vehicle.

Investigators face many complications. The 911 callers who witnessed the accident are long gone, heading to safety in advance of the storm. Only a few have been interviewed by authorities. The 21 survivors were taken to an area hospital; some were treated and released.

The bus was carted off the freeway at 10 a.m., the freeway reopened five minutes later. The bus was "underneath a metal shed on a flatbed trailer protected from the elements overhead," Peritz said.

"The impetus to move this thing was the fact that we literally had thousands of people trapped in their cars trying to get away from pending bad weather. We needed to save as many people as we can to get them out of harm's way in advance of the weather," Peritz said.