If the dangers posed by fatigued drivers of tour buses hadn’t been made clear before, they certainly have been made painfully clear in 2011. The latest in a string of fatal bus accidents happened yesterday when a bus driver was killed when the tour bus he drove slammed into a flatbed tractor-trailer.
About two dozen others, including bus passengers and the truck driver, were injured in the crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The bus was making its way from Kentucky to New York City.
The charter bus carried 56 people when it rear-ended the rig just before 7:30 in the morning.
The 39-year-old bus driver, who is from New York, died in the wreck.
An area newspaper report stated that the passengers were of Asian descent and that there were communication problems between rescuers and passengers after the crash. Apparently the group’s translator was among those injured and hospitalized.
According to the report, federal records indicate that the Mr. Ho Charter Service bus company is over the threshold for citations for fatigued drivers. The threshold is 50 percent of drivers cited; the company’s score was 68.9 percent.
In March of this year, 15 people were killed in a crash of a casino gambling tour bus on a New York highway.
The bus was returning to New York City from a trip to a Connecticut casino.
Just two days later, a pair of people were killed when a bus driven by a New York resident crashed in New Jersey.
Last month, four more people were killed when a bus from North Carolina crashed on its way to New York City when the driver fell asleep. That company, like the company involved in yesterday’s crash, had a history of drivers being cited for fatigued driving.
