On December 12, 2017, just before 6:50 a.m. central standard time, a 2004 International 65-passenger school bus, operated by the Riverside Community School District, was traveling south on rural 480th Street outside Oakland, Iowa. The bus driver turned onto a residential driveway for the first student pickup on his route. After the 16-year-old female student boarded, the driver reversed out of the driveway, as was his normal practice for the location, backed across 480th Street, and continued reversing until the bus’s rear wheels ran off the road and dropped into a 3-foot-deep ditch. While the driver tried to drive the bus out of the ditch, a fire began in the engine compartment and spread throughout the bus. The driver and passenger died in the fire.
We determined that the probable cause of the fatal school bus run-off-road and fire in Oakland, Iowa, was (1) the driver’s failure to control the bus, backing it into a roadside ditch for reasons that could not be established; and (2) the failure of the Riverside Community School District to provide adequate oversight by allowing a driver to operate a school bus with a known physical impairment that limited his ability to perform emergency duties. The probable cause of the fire was ignition of a fuel source on the exterior of the engine’s turbocharger due to turbocharger overload and heat production, resulting from the blockage of the exhaust pipe by the bus’s position in the ditch and the driver’s attempts to accelerate out of the ditch. Contributing to the severity of the fire was the spread of flames, heat, and toxic gases from the engine into the passenger compartment through an incomplete firewall.
As a result of its investigation, we made recommendations to the US Department of Transportation; the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA); 44 states (including Iowa), the District of Columbia, and the territory of Puerto Rico; the state of Iowa; the Riverside Community School District; the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, the National Association for Pupil Transportation, and the National School Transportation Association; and school bus manufacturers Blue Bird Corporation, Collins Industries, Inc., IC Bus, Starcraft Bus, Thomas Built Buses, Inc., Trans Tech, and Van-Con, Inc.
