More than two dozen people were injured during a crash caused by one school bus smashing into another in a rear-end collision in Fort Worth in the middle of the afternoon of Monday, April 27, 2015. Both buses were transporting students from Summer Creek Middle School when one of the buses rear-ended the other bus near the intersection of Summer Creek Drive and Summer Park Drive, only a short distance from the school.
Between the two vehicles, 70 children were traveling home from school aboard the buses at the time of the crash. Of these, at least 23 were taken to Texas Health Resources Southwest Medical Center for medical evaluation and treatment, as well as two adults. No fatalities resulted from this collision, and all injured parties are expected to make a full recovery.
The cause of the crash is still under investigation at this time, although weather may have played a part in the accident, as conditions were wet and rainy at the time the collision took place. It has been reported that some sort of issue on the first bus—possibly involving poor behavior on the part of the student passengers—may have caused it to stop, rendering the second bus unable to brake effectively in time to avoid collision when it traveled over the hill where the first bus was located. Upon receiving call of the double bus crash, the MedStar ambulance company issued its AmBus—a medical treatment and evaluation vehicle equipped to handle large numbers of victims—to the site of the accident.
Nearly 1,400 violations were discovered during more than 5,500 inspections of Durham School Services—the company that provides bussing services for children in the district—over a two-year period. Whether such violations may have been a factor in this most recent crash is not yet known. A little over 325 collisions were reported during the same two-year timeframe of the prior statistics. However, in only a small number of cases was the driver’s fault found so severe as to rule out future driving for the company (around 3 percent).