24 Bellaire nursing home residents die in evacuee bus fire

03:33 PM CDT on Friday, September 23, 2005

By Michael Grabell / The Dallas Morning News

Click to watch news conference with Bellaire mayor

Click to watch video of injured being treated at scene

Click to watch Cynthia Vega's report from scene

Click to watch aerials of bus fire

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An explosion preceded the deadly fire on the passenger bus.

A bus exploded early Friday on traffic-packed Interstate 45 in Wilmer, killing at least 24 elderly nursing home patients being evacuated from Houston in one of the deadliest accidents in state history.

"It caught fire and pulled over, and it was just a difficult to get all these cases out," said Capt. Jesse Garcia of Dallas Fire-Rescue. "We were literally dragging them out."

Fourteen injured people were taken to area hospitals, most of them to Parkland Memorial Hospital. The driver and eight patients were in fair condition at Parkland, while one patient who suffered severe smoke inhalation was admitted to the intensive care unit in critical condition.

Four more patients were treated and released from Baylor University Medical Center.

The bus was headed north toward Dallas about 6:30 a.m. when a witness, who said he had been driving for 20 hours in the jam-packed I-45 corridor, saw it pass his car with smoke pouring out of the rear on the driver's side. About two minutes later, the bus exploded just north of Mars Road.

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Several people were treated for smoke inhalation and other injuries.

Later Friday morning, the burned-out skeleton of the bus was loaded onto a trailer and moved to a large open garage at the Dallas County Road and Bridge District 3 complex. There, Dallas County sheriff's deputies pulled back the blue tarp that had covered the bodies to reveal a grim scene: Seats pushed forward like dominoes, with remnants of bodies sandwiched between them.

Commissioner John Wiley Price said the destruction was so bad that Dallas County Chief Medical Examiner Jeffrey Bernard had reported that it would be difficult to get dental samples to identify all of the victims.

"Any time you've got this kind of inferno, you have to go from tissue," he said Bernard told him.

It could take three to four weeks to identify some of the bodies through tissue samples, he said.

Sgt. Don Peritz, spokesman for the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, said the bus was evacuating ahead of Hurricane Rita from the Brighton Gardens nursing home in Bellaire, near Houston.

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The Department of Aging and Disability Services' online database showed that the home was caring for four patients who had been transferred there because of Hurricane Katrina.

Meghan K. Lublin, a spokeswoman for Virginia-based Sunrise Senior Living, which owns Brighton Gardens, said the bus was transporting 38 senior citizens and six employees.

Erv Roorda, spiritual care coordinator at Vista Care, a hospice service, said his staff was contracted to help the evacuees who were on the bus to settle in at two Sunrise nursing homes: The Forum on Park Lane in Dallas and Edenbrook of Plano on Midway Road.

"These are people who were facing terminal illnesses or long-term illnesses," he said.

Jane Roberts, executive director of a third area Sunrise facility, Eden Terrace of Arlington, said all survivors of the bus fire would be placed at The Forum at Park Lane. A second bus that left the Bellaire nursing home arrived safely at her nursing home about 10 a.m., she said.

Sgt. Peritz said the problem may have originated with the vehicle's brakes. A fire broke out and apparently spread quickly, igniting one of the senior citizen's oxygen tanks, he said.

Dr. Paul Pepe, chairman of emergency medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said one of the victims told him that they stopped at 5:55 a.m. to change a tire. After they got back on the road, people started signaling that smoke was coming from the back of the bus. They pulled over and began trying to put the fire out, he said.

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Elderly survivors were comforted at the scene.

The explosion caused a 17-mile backup on a freeway that already was heavily congested with evacuees from the Gulf Coast. Among the dozens of emergency vehicles on the scene were those of the Combine, Seagoville, Ferris, Wilmer and Dallas County fire departments.

According to David Robertson, a Dallas County deputy sheriff on the scene, the bus left a lengthy skid mark on I-45. A piece of metal was lodged in the right rear wheel of the bus, and crash investigators believe this caused the tires to lock up.

The right rear wheel was burned all the way down to the rim, and the tires were completely melted away from the rear.

Robertson said the scene on the bus was horrific.

"They were all on top of each other trying to get out," he said. "It's pretty bad."

A witness to the accident, Fred Whitte, 74, lives on the service road near Mars Road.

"I was watching it burn and wham, I could feel it on my back," he said. "The whole freeway was packed. I thought, 'Boy, is this ever going to end?"

Whitte said five or six carloads of people stopped and started removing people from the bus and laying them on the road before the bus exploded. He said that he heard at least one big explosion and two smaller ones. Charred pieces of the bus shot across the northbound service road and into the white metal fence around Texas Star Truck Sales nearby, he said.

Commissioner Price said that as authorities arrived, a deputy tried to guide passengers out of the bus with a flashlight. But the thick, black smoke made it too dark for the deputy to see, and then the oxygen containers began to explode.

No rescue workers were injured.

"It's pretty rough," Price said. "People just trying to make it to safety and recovery and this happens. I've never seen a scene like this."

Two to three minutes after he saw the smoke, Roberto Orozco, 31, said he saw the bus pull over and people running out looking for help.

Orozco pulled over and joined others who were running back toward the bus to help when he saw it explode.

"I came here running to help somebody and then I saw the first explosion," he said. He said there were two explosions a few minutes apart and the bus was engulfed in flames.

"A lot of fire in the bus," said Orozco, holding his 2-year old child. "Old ladies crying and crying and crying."

Orozco said he managed to help two people.

Bellaire Mayor Cindy Siegel said the charter bus was one of two that left Brighton Gardens about 3 p.m. Thursday. Nursing home officials decided to move the residents when it appeared that Rita might hit the Houston-Galveston area directly.

Eighty percent of Bellaire is in the 100-year flood plain. The city of 16,000 surrounded by Houston experienced extreme flooding during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

"We had concerns that if we flooded again or during the winds we wouldn't be able to respond," the mayor said.

There was no mandatory evacuation order, but Brighton Gardens officials decided to ask family members to get residents more able to move and then put those who needed special assistance on a bus.

Sunrise Senior Living officials said they were contacting relatives of the victims.

"Our primary concern is for the safety of our residents and we are shocked and saddened that this even occurred during our evacuation," said Paul Klaassen, chairman and CEO. "We are fully cooperating with authorities investigating this incident to determine its cause."

By 8 a.m., the charred bus remained along the highway where it came to a halt. A large triage center was set up to treat the wounded before they were carried to hospitals, and a blue tarp was laid out over some of the dead.

Traffic began moving again after 8 a.m. as it was diverted off I-45 to access roads and other routes.

Authorities decided to clear the site before National Transportation Safety officials arrived, leaving the bodies of the victims covered with tarp on the bus. They said they were concerned about the potential traffic tie-ups on I-45 as thousands of Rita evacuees continue to move north into Dallas.

Bernard said the medical examiners were asking for help from a disaster mortuary team that had been staged in the area to help with Hurricane Katrina. The team, known as D-MORT, includes anthropologists who can examine bones from the worst cases to come up with a general description of the victim's gender and stature.