Firefighters explore school buses for fire safety
Jerry Eslick with Professional Rescue Innovations (PRI) points to a section of the door and explains how to remove it during a recent training for area first responders. Leo Reigelsberger, Transportation Director and Scott Thompson, Humboldt County Firefighters Association President hired PRI to train area first responders in the case of a catastrophic event on a school bus.
By APRIL KELLEY
On Wednesday, Jan. 7, area firefighters and ambulance personnel spent the evening training on the best practices for handling passengers on a school bus following an accident.
Riding the school bus is one of the safest ways for school children to travel to school. According to research done at MIT, students are 70 times more likely to get to school safely by bus than car. Recent laws and innovations are improving those numbers every year.
Starting in Oct. of 2019, all new buses purchased by schools in Iowa are required to have lap and shoulder belts, although older buses were not required to be retrofitted.
In Humboldt, five buses are outfitted with seatbelts and three buses for Twin Rivers have them.
Another safety feature on those eight buses is a fire suppression system. The systems, which cost approximately $3,500 per bus put out a fire in less than a minute, saving lives.
In Iowa, there are approximately 8,500 school buses in service that transport 227,000 students every day in Iowa.
In the last 10 years, nearly 2,000 crashes have involved school buses. Of those, 11 were fatal, resulting in 13 deaths.
While the number of deaths is statistically low, even one death is too much if it can be prevented. The only way to cut that number down is to have proper training before an emergency.
Humboldt Community School District (HCSD) transportation Director Leo Reigelsberger had been approached by several fire departments to bring buses to the stations to train on evacuation procedures in person.
“It’s a little hard for me to bring a couple of buses to the stations by myself so I went to Scott (Thompson, president of the Humboldt County Firefighters Association) and we decided to do a countywide training,” Reigelsberger said.
Read the full story in this week's issue of the Humboldt Independent!
