The Carrolton School Bus Crash

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The Carrolton School Bus Crash

The division of wealth is unevenly distributed throughout society’s so called social ladder. The “haves,” those who run corporations or have major influence on government decisions, control the majority of the wealth and resource available to achieve that wealth. Their major purpose it to build on that wealth no matter what the consequence may be. Those decisions sometimes negatively impact the lives of the “have nots,” people who, like us, have minimal if any influence on corporate spending and decisions.

On May 14th, 1988 a group of children and adults from the First Assembly of God Church in Radcliff, Kentucky got aboard a Ford built 1977 Superior B-700 school bus and headed to King’s Island amusement park. King’s Island is located about 170 miles from Radcliff where the church is located. After spending the whole day at the amusement park, the group got on the bus and began traveling on Interstate seventy-one in northern Kentucky back to Radcliff. At about 10:45 P.M. while heading south on Interstate 71 just outside of Carrollton, Kentucky, the bus collided with a black pickup truck driven by Larry W. Mahoney.

Mahoney was traveling north in the southbound lane at an extremely high amount of speed. The right front of the pickup truck hit the right front of the bus, breaking off the bus’s suspension and driving the leaf spring backward into the gas tank mounted outside the frame, just behind the front door. The spring speared the sixty-gallon tank, which had just been filled ten minutes earlier, punching a two and a half-inch hole in it. The gas tank caught fire and killed twenty-seven of the sixty-seven people on board. If the pickup had hit a few inches to the right, it would have been stopped by the bus’s frame rail instead of shearing trough sheet metal toward the fuel tank.

In 1974 Congress passed school bus safety legislation, three years before the Carrollton school bus was built. Manufactures, like Ford Motor Company, managed to delay the implementation of automotive safety standards, including those relating to school-bus safety. In 1971, President of Ford Motor at the time, Lee Iacocca, was known to have lobbied President Richard Nixon to put off costly new rules for cars. He was quoted as saying, “Safety has really killed all of our business. He could have also been lobbying for the Ford Pinto, which was surrounded by much controversy due to the placement of its gas tank.

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