Two Students Dead After Houston Bus Overturns on Highway

[Capt. Obvious]

Source: NBC

Two high school students were killed and two others were injured after a bus went sailing over a highway overpass in Houston on Tuesday morning, school officials said. The bus driver was also hurt in the crash.

The Houston Fire Department responded to the wreck just after 7 a.m. local time, Senior Captain Ruy Lozano told NBC News. The Houston Independent School District wrote on its blog that a female student died at the scene, and a second female student later died of her injuries.

The other two students aboard the bus and the driver were "seriously injured" and taken to local hospitals, the school said.

Houston police were at the scene trying to reconstruct the accident. According to witness reports, a motorist in a Buick LeSabre swerved into the bus, sending it careening into the guard rail and then over the overpass.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/one-killed-after-school-bus-houston-gets-wreck-n427561

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Oh my god, the photos are terrifying.

[Roland99]

1. Odds the Buick's driver was texting or dialing a cell phone?

[snooper2]

2. Not sure but the highways in Houston are FUCKED

Went to Galveston last summer when you are driving down 45 South through downtown what a cluster fuck...

Whoever the original architect was needs to be shot-

[olegramps]

3. Just yesterday I had to take drastic action to avoid being sideswiped by a person on a phone.

She was so engrossed in her conversation that she came onto the highway without even looking. I was looking ahead at the traffic in my lane and only at the last moment did I see her car coming at me from the side and I swerved into the on coming lane that was thankfully empty. Several times I have been in the left hand turn lane and the person ahead was using their cell phone and didn't know the light had changed. One time I hooked and the nice lady responded by gaving me the bird.

[Roland99]

4. Guy in front of me on my commute today...

He was going 10mph *under* the posted limit (guess that's a good thing maybe) and I could see his head looking down once in a while and he kept drifting to the right edge of the road (2-lane road)

He eventually turned down a side street.

[kentauros]

5. No.

Because from both the description above and the video on the link, it was another driver to the left of the Buick that drifted into her lane. She then over-compensated (instead of just hitting the brakes) and hit the bus. Had she been using her mirrors, she'd have known the bus was there, and braked instead of veering. So, there's fault all around. Although I would guess that the one that drifted never stopped because they were too engrossed in their phone to notice that they'd just caused a fatal accident.

[Roland99]

7. The Buick driver *claimed* that. No witnesses have come forward to verify.

And it was the bus driver that over-compensated, not the Buick driver.

[kentauros]

8. I consider "jerking the wheel" to be over-compensating.

And I have seen far too many people drift into lanes and never once look up to realize they were about to hit anyone. I seriously doubt any text-driver would remember where they were at any given moment on the roads in order for them to come forward as a witness.

[kentauros]

6. The photo of the caved-in bus reminds me

of talking to an Australian friend online some years ago. When I showed her a photo of a typical school bus in this country, she was horrified. Now, to be honest, her horror may have also stemmed from me saying that, structurally, they weren't much more than a long flatbed truck with seats and a roof (because, truly, they aren't.)

Then she showed me a photo of their school buses. I thought I was looking at the latest tech in a mass-transit buses from Germany! And that was their school bus! It was low to the ground, low center of gravity, and a low first step. It really looked like a touring bus, other than not being nearly as high as such a bus here. It also looked like it would have survived the crash above without much harm to either the bus or the passengers.

I guess that's the "little" stuff you get when you don't have to fuel an insane military budget...