OT School bus accident

You never know when it is your time to meet your maker! I imagine no one involved in this one had that thought on their mind yesterday morning.
http://www.omaha.com/article/201209...e-hill-mourns-four-killed-in-school-bus-crash

I owned a bus company for quite a few years and still drive on
occasion. This just almost brings tears to my eyes. My fear
every day was that someone would be injured on one of my
buses. I never had any kind of problem and it still worried me
nearly to my witt's end.

I don't have any idea where the fault was and it doesn't matter.
People drove around my bus just like they do around my
loaded grain truck. It just makes my blood boil. I know that has
no bearing, but it irritates me.

My only hope is that in the end it was something that finds
neither driver at fault. That rarely happens, though. It's so sad.

I live on a gravel road 20 miles west of Lincoln, and, frankly, I feel a helluva lot safer rolling down the Interstate at 75-80 mph than I do driving the gravel roads around our house.

This accident didn't involve farm machinery, but the way farm machinery has grown in size exponentially over the last few years, it's amazing there aren't more serious and fatal accidents on country roads.

There's a stop sign a quarter of a mile south of my house, and just his afternoon when I was coming home on the road with the right-of-way, a huge John Deere MFD tractor with duals on all four corners pulling a 1,000 bushel grain cart first ignored the stop sign, then locked up his brakes, and slid half way across the road in front of me. I slid to a stop beside him.

I can sit on my deck all day and watch all manner of harvest equipment, including semis, blow through the stop sign like it wasn't even there. And there are trees blocking visibility in one direction.

If a trucker needs a special permit to haul this huge equipment down a public highway, why aren't farmers required to have a permit to drive down public roads that are usually narrower than a highway? I know, that's a subject no politician in his right mind will touch. Theyll wait until things get totally out of control before they do anything. And I have nothing against farmers, I was one myself, once.

I retired from driving truck after 35 years. I took a job at our local school driving bus 3 years ago. I can't even imagine dealing with something like that. I have seen many bad accidents over the years but never seen a fatal school bus accident and pray I never do.

One nice thing in Wisconsin there are no gravel roads (atleast not around here). I never have to worry about traction as if I were on gravel, don't have to worry about being choked out in a dust cloud, etc....

I live on a back road that in most states would be gravel, but fortunatly for me it's not. They resurfaced it a couple weeks ago so it's got plenty of loose stones on it now from the process, but it's still better than gravel.

I'm also plowed out by 5:30-6:00 AM in the winter too. Unless it was a really bad one, then they may be an hour late. That's only happened once in the 3 winters I've spent here.

Donovan from Wisconsin

While better roads are needed in many places, it ain't the roads that cause accidents, it's the idiots that drive on them.

"My only hope is that in the end it was something that finds neither driver at fault."

Why would you wish that? If nobody was at fault, then it just means our roads and vehicles are inherently unsafe and there's nothing that can be done to make them safer.

I'm a firm believer that nearly every accident is preventable. All accidents have a chain of events; break one link in the chain and there's no accident.

They are reporting it as a gravel intersection with no stop signs! Both party's must have not seen the other, for whatever reason.

Sadly I live near many corners with no stop signs and watch folks go through them at all speeds up to about 70 mph. The smart people treat all of those corners as stop signs and take two looks. Some farmers are planting corn in the right-of-way ditch too and you have trouble even seeing traffic when you try to pull into the intersection. Some folks also blow the real stop signs too and eventually it does catch up to them in a bad way.

Very sad for the loss of lives in this crash.

It only takes one moment of inattention for something like this to happen.

I have the law on speed dial for the ones blowing stop signs as I have a near miss at least once a year.