Two die when school bus, dump truck collide
More than 40 people were taken to hospitals, some in critical condition
MOUNT OLIVE, N.J. — A school bus taking children on a field trip to a New Jersey historic site collided with a dump truck Thursday, ripping the bus apart and killing a teacher and a student.
The crash left the bus lying on its side on the guardrail of Interstate 80 in Mount Olive, its undercarriage and front end sheared off and its steering wheel exposed. Some of the victims crawled out of the emergency exit in the back and an escape hatch on the roof. More than 40 people were taken to hospitals.
“I heard a scraping sound and we toppled over the highway,” said fifth-grade student Theo Ancevski, who was sitting in the fourth row and was treated at a hospital for cuts and scrapes. “A lot of people were screaming and hanging from their seatbelts.”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy said one adult and one student were killed. Their names had not been released. Murphy said the truck driver was hospitalized, but officials didn’t reveal his condition.
The front end of the red dump truck was mangled in the wreck, which took place about 50 miles west of New York. The truck was registered to Mendez Trucking, of Belleville.
Police didn’t release details of how the crash occurred, but the trucking company has had a string of crashes in recent years and a higher than average rate of violations that sidelined its vehicles, according to federal safety data.
Forty-five people, including 38 students, were on the bus. Fortythree people from the bus and the truck driver were taken to area hospitals. Some were listed in critical condition.
The bus was owned by the school district and had seat belts, according to Paramus schools superintendent Michele Robinson. No federal requirement calls for seat belts on full-sized school buses, but six states, including New Jersey, require them.
The bus was one of three taking students from East Brook Middle School to Waterloo Village, a historic site depicting a Lenape Indian community and oncethriving port about 5 miles from the crash scene. The other buses made it to the site, but returned to the school.
Some of the children were inside the bus and some outside when first responders arrived, according to Jeff Paul, director of the Morris County Office of Emergency Management.
“We had patients lying all over the median and on the interstate,” Paul said. “There were all kinds of injuries, every injury type you could expect in a crash of this magnitude.”
Paul said some of the first responders were “very emotionally upset. It was a rough scene to see.”
Robinson said the district was cancelling school trips for the rest of the year.
Mendez Trucking has about 40 drivers and trucks, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Its trucks have been in seven crashes during the last two years before Thursday’s crash, according to FMCSA. None of them was fatal. Messages left with the company weren’t returned.
Mendez has a higher than average vehicle out-of-service rate, which means inspections found violations that had to be corrected before the vehicle could be returned to service. Mendez’s rate was 37.9 percent, according to FMCSA. The national average is 20.7.
“It’s an alarmingly high accident rate for such a small, little f leet,” said trucking safety expert Paul Herbert, who runs the Western Motor Carrier Safety Institute in California. “These (previous accidents) should be eye-openers for the company, for them to say, ‘hey, we need to do something before the big one happens.’ Sadly, it looks like maybe it has.”
A Mendez-owned dump truck driven by a driver police say had a suspended license struck and killed a French fashion stylist in Manhattan in January 2011, according to court records. Laurence Renard was severed in half by the truck, which was hauling tons of material for the Second Avenue Subway project.
Mendez was fined $22,850 in 2016 for violating regulations on inspections, repairs and maintenance and post-crash drug and alcohol testing, according to the FMCSA.