Neighbors help after tree falls on bus

None of the children on school bus is hurt, but driver has minor injuries.

Six children with special needs were evacuated from their school bus Thursday morning after a large tree fell on the vehicle near a southwest Atlanta school.

The tree came down on top of the bus just before 7:30 a.m. as it drove along Beecher Circle, not far from Beecher Hills Elementary School. According to Atlanta police, there were no reports of serious injury.

Atlanta Public Schools confirmed the children are Beecher Hills students and said school administrators, the special edu

cation instructional team and school police responded to the scene immediately, and the stu

dents’ parents were notified. None of the children was injured, the school district said, and they were taken on to school.

“The driver reported minor injuries and was taken to a local hospital,” the district said in a statement. “The safety, security, and well-being of APS students and employees is a top priority for the district.”

A loud crashing sound first alerted Victor M. Mccoy to commotion outside his home. As a former state park worker, he quickly recognized the sound as a falling tree and went to assess the damage.

Then he heard a woman screaming and spotted the yellow end of the school bus peeking out from behind dense foliage. Mccoy and a neighbor worked to pry open the back emergency door to check on the woman inside.

“When she told me it was kids, and they (had) special needs, I just wanted to make sure they were safe,” he told The Atlanta

Journal-constitution. “And there wasn’t danger out here for them, you know, like an electrical wire or a fire.”

A snapped power line briefly caught a branch on fire, he said, but it burned itself out. According to Mccoy, there were two women on the bus, a driver and an aide who said the driver got glass in her eyes.

Mccoy waited with the women and the children until EMS and firefighters arrived to help them off the bus. He was glad it wasn’t more serious.

“It was better that it was a bus than a car, because a bus has reinforcements,” he said. “Because that’s a big tree, and it didn’t crush it. If that would have been a car, it would have been a different story.”

Crews closed Beecher Road for several hours Thursday while they worked to clear the tree debris.

JOHN SPINK/JOHN.SPINK@AJC.COM Crews work to disentangle a school bus from a fallen tree along Beecher Circle on Thursday morning in Atlanta. A witness at the scene said two women, a driver and an aide, were on the bus with children when the tree came down.