Skip to footer

Ohio bus crash: Did driver fall asleep?

A Greyhound bus crashed on I-75 early Saturday, injuring 34 people. The bus was traveling from Cincinnati to Detroit. One passenger says the driver fell asleep at the wheel.

  • By Staff Associated Press

| Liberty Township, Ohio

 Authorities say a Greyhound bus left the highway, flipped and landed on its side in a cornfield in southwest Ohio and 34 people have been hurt, with injuries ranging from minor to severe.

Officials with the Butler County Emergency Operations Center say in a statement the bus, carrying 51 passengers and the driver, was headed northbound on I-75 early Saturday when it overturned about 26 miles north of Cincinnati at approximately 4 a.m.

Authorities say 34 people have been transported to area hospitals. They say six were taken from the scene by medical helicopters, and 28 others taken to hospitals by ambulance.

Officials say the bus left Cincinnati and was bound for Detroit. Passengers who were not injured were transported back to Cincinnati.

There was no immediate official word on the cause of the crash. But a passenger interviewed by WHIO-TV said that the driver fell asleep.

Last year, the Department of Transportation cracked shut down 26 intercity bus operators, declaring them "imminent hazards to public safety." It was the single largest safety crackdown in the history of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), the branch of the DOT established in 2000 to help curb fatalities and injuries resulting from bus and truck crashes, reported The Christian Science Monitor.

The FMCSA began investigating the carriers operating along I-95 after a series of deadly bus crashes in spring 2011. Greyhound was not one of the carriers cited in last year's safety crackdown.

Motorcoach travel is considered a safe mode of highway travel, with 750 million passenger trips per year, the DOT reports. Motorcoach company inspections have more than doubled from 2005 to 2011. Even so, motorcoach crashes have resulted in an average of 19 occupant fatalities per year over the past 10 years. That does not include fatalities among pedestrians, drivers, and passengers of other vehicles involved in those crashes.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to Ohio bus crash: Did driver fall asleep?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Latest-News-Wires/2013/0914/Ohio-bus-crash-Did-driver-fall-asleep
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe