Evacuees Bus Explodes

Bus Bursts Into Flames, Killing Up To 24
Passengers Were Elderly Hurricane Evacuees
POSTED: 8:06 am EDT September 23, 2005
UPDATED: 9:36 pm EDT September 23, 2005
DALLAS -- A fire in a chartered bus filled with elderly Hurricane Rita evacuees, including some who used oxygen, killed 24 people and injured several others near Dallas Friday.
Authorities said the bus apparently caught fire due to a mechanical problem, and that oxygen tanks then started exploding on gridlocked Interstate 45. Dallas County Sheriff's Sgt. Don Peritz said the brakes may have been on fire, leading to the explosion.
Peritz said deputies couldn't get everyone off the flaming bus. The bus was carrying 38 residents and six employees of the Brighton Gardens nursing home in Bellaire to Plano, according to Sunrise Senior Living, the McLean, Va., company that owns the center.
They had been on the road since Thursday.
Nine people between the ages of 78 and 101 were sent to Parkland Hospital, where all except one were believed to be OK with only minor burns. One woman suffered severe smoke inhalation and was in critical condition Friday morning.
Three women and one man were sent to Baylor Medical Center, where they are listed in fair condition.
The bus, surrounded by police cars and ambulances, was engulfed with flames and later reduced to a blackened, burned-out shell with large blue tarps covering many seats.
Peritz said permission was given to remove the charred hulk of the bus from the northbound lane with the bodies still on board, shrouded by the tarps. The crowded interstate is a primary Hurricane Rita evacuation route.
Peritz said the driver and arriving deputies tried to rescue as many passengers from the bus as possible but couldn't save everybody. He said the driver survived.
"It's my understanding he went back on the bus several times to try to evacuate people," he said.
The fire caused a 17-mile backup on a freeway that was already heavily congested with evacuees from the Gulf Coast.
Northbound lanes on I-45 were reopened late Friday morning. State officials said traffic was being diverted off I-45 onto U.S. Highway 287 at Ennis, about 30 miles southeast of Dallas.
I-45 stretches more than 250 miles from Galveston through Houston to Dallas.
Bellaire city officials defended the decision to evacuate the elderly patients from the Brighton Gardens nursing home.
“(Evacuating was) the right decision," Bellaire Mayor Cindy Siegel said. "Brighton Gardens was following their evacuation procedures. Just 24 hours ago, (Houston) was expected to take the brunt of Hurricane Rita, Brighton Gardens was doing their job to get their patients to safety"
"Unfortunately, this is a tragedy that we are very saddened by. I don’t think anyone can ever plan for every tragedy that can occur,” Siegel said.
Siegel said relatives of residents of Brighton Gardens should contact the nursing home directly at (713) 665-3888 or (800) 786-7471 to obtain information on their conditions.
Nurse Saw Fire, Explosion
A nurse who was driving behind the bus said she saw it start to smoke, and then pull to the side of the road.
Tina Jones said, "I saw the smoke, and then there was an explosion."
She pulled over and helped treat minor injuries. And she said she saw at least six bodies.
After witnessing the horror, Jones said she'll "probably go home and have a good cry."
Hurricane Rita
Forecasters say Hurricane Rita remains an extremely dangerous Category 4 storm with 140 mph winds. It's turned to the right more than anticipated, meaning it may spare Houston and Galveston, Texas, a direct hit.

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The Real Katrina Story

Please pass this around so we'll know what really happened...


I heard from my aunt last night that my cousin Denise
made it out of New Orleans; she's at her brother's in
Baton Rouge. from what she told me:

her mother, a licensed practical nurse, was called in
to work on Sunday night at Memorial Hospital
(historically known as Baptist Hospital to those of us
from N.O.). Denise decided to stay with her mother,
her niece and grandniece (who is 2 years old); she
figured they'd be safe at t! he
hospital. they went to
Baptist, and had to wait hours to be assigned a room
to sleep in; after they were finally assigned a room,
two white nurses suddenly arrived after the cut-off
time (time to be assigned a room), and Denise and her
family wer e booted out; their room was given up to the
new nurses. Denise was furious, and rather than stay
at Baptist, decided to walk home (several blocks away)
to ride out the storm at her mother's apartment. her
mother stayed at the hospital.

she described it as the scariest time in her life. 3
of the rooms in the apartment (there are only 4) caved
in. ceilings caved in, walls caved in. she huddled
under a mattress in the hall. she thought she would
die from either the storm or a heart attack. after the
storm passed, she went back to Baptist to seek shelter
(this was Monday). it was also scary at Baptist; the electricity was
out, they were running on generators, there was no! air
conditioning.
Tuesday the levees broke, and water began rising. they moved patients
upstairs, saw boats pass by on what used to be streets. they were told
that they would be evacuated, that buses were coming. then they were
told they would have to walk to the nearest intersection, Napoleon and
S. Claiborne, to await the buses. they waded out in hip-deep water,
only
to stand at the intersection, on the neutral ground (what y'all call
the
median) for 3 1/2 hours. the buses came and took them to the Ernest
Morial Convention Center. (yes, the convention center you've all seen
on
TV.)

Denise said she thought she was in hell. they were
there for 2 days, with no water, no food. no shelter.
Denise, her mother (63 years old), her niece (21 years
old), and 2-year-old grandniece. when they arrived,
there were already thousands of people there. they
were told that buses were coming. police drove by,
windows rolled up, thumbs up signs. national
guard
trucks rolled by, completely empty, soldiers with guns
cocked and aimed at them. nobody stopped to drop off
water. a helicopter dropped a load of water, but all
the bottles exploded on impact due to the height of
the helicopter.

th e first day (Wednesday) 4 people died next to her.
the second day (Thursday) 6 people died next to her.
Denise told me the people around her all thought they
had been sent there to die. again, nobody stopped. the
only buses that came were full; they dropped off more
and more people, but nobody was being picked up and
taken away. they found out that those being dropped
off had been rescued from rooftops and attics; they
got off the buses delirious from lack of water and
food. completely dehydrated. the crowd tried to keep
them all in one area; Denise said the new arrivals had
mostly lost their minds. they had gone crazy.

inside the convention center, the place was one huge
bathroom. in
order to sh**, you had to stand in other
people's sh**. the floors were black and slick with
sh**. most people stayed outside because the smell was
so bad. but outside wasn't much better: between the
heat, the humidity, the lack of water, the ol d and
very young dying from dehydration... and there was no
place to lay down, not even room on the sidewalk. they
slept outside Wednesday night, under an overpass.

Denise said yes, there were young men with guns there.
but they organized the crowd. they went to Canal
Street and "looted," and brought back food and water
for the old people and the babies, because nobody had
eaten in days. when the police rolled down windows and
yelled out "the buses are coming," the young men with
guns organized the crowd in order: old people in
front, women and children next, men in the back. just
so that when the buses came, there would be priorities
of who got out first.

Denise said the fights
she saw between the young men
with guns were fist fights. she saw them put their
guns down and fight rather than shoot up the crowd.
but she said that there were a handful of people shot
in the convention center; their bodies were left
inside, along with other dead babies and old people.

Denise said the people thought there were being sent
there to die. lots of people being dropped off, nobody
being picked up. cops passing by, speeding off.
national guard rolling by with guns aimed at them. and
yes, a few men shot at the police, because at a
certain point all the people thought the cops were
coming to hurt them, to kill them all. she saw a young
man who had stolen a car speed past, cops in pursuit;
he crashed the car, got out and ran, and the cops shot
him in the back. in front of the whole crowd. she saw
many groups of people decide that they were going to
walk across the bridge to the west bank, and those
same groups would
return, saying that they were met at
the top of the bridge by armed police ordering them to
turn around, that they weren't allowed to leave.

so they all believed they were sent there to die.

Denise's niece found a pay phone, and kept trying to
call her mother's boyfriend in Baton Rouge, and
finally got through and told him where they were. the boyfriend, and
Denise's brother, drove down from Baton Rouge and came and got them.
they had to bribe a few cops, and talk a few into letting them into
the
city ("come on, man, my 2-year-old niece is at the Convention
Center!"),
then they took back roads to get to them.

after arriving at my other cousin's apartment in Baton
Rouge, they saw the images on TV, and couldn't believe
how the media was portraying the people of New
Orleans. she kept repeating to me on the phone last
night: make sure you tell everybody that they left us
there to die. nobody came. those young men with
guns
were protecting us. if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't
have had the little water and food they had found.

that's Denise Moore's story.

Lisa C. Moore



God whispers in your soul and speaks to your heart.
Sometimes
when you don't have time to listen, He has to throw a brick at you.
It's
your choice:
Listen to the whisper...
or wait for the brick.



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to that which you are not."
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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.