National Coalition For School Bus Safety

NATIONAL COALITION OF SCHOOL BUS SAFETY NEWS UP TO DEC. 2003

May 26, 2002

NHTSA FAILS AGAIN
After four years of effort and at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of thousands of dollars, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has again failed to properly identify design defects in school bus and implement needed safety improvements to protect the 25 million children who ride school buses back and forth to school every school day.

History. Thirty-five years ago in California, UCLA engineers performed a series of classic school bus crash studies, which determined that the major cause for injury in school bus accidents was the inadequacy of school bus seats. They proposed “compartmentalization” of the child occupants between high back, well padded and anchored seats capable of absorbing crash forces and a massive aisle side panel to contain riders. A lap belt was suggested to provide substantial additional protection.

Ten years later, in response to a Congressional mandate, NHTSA promulgated Federal Motor Vehicle Standard 222 that provided for some of the proposed features. The 222 seat was better anchored, padded and designed for energy absorbing and was 4 inches higher than seats in then use. However, the standard fell far short of the UCLA findings. NHTSA failed to include the all important compartmentalizing side panel, the lap belt, and seat back height increase was eight inches lower than the engineers had recommended. As a result “compartmentalization” was significantly compromised, working adequately for front-end crashes but providing no passenger protection in side impacts and bus rollovers.

For the past 25 years and continuing with the April 2002 “REPORT TO CONGRESS, School Bus Safety: Crashwothiness Research,” NHTSA has persisted in obscuring the absence of lateral and rollover protection by testing and evaluating the 222 seat entirely from a frontal accident configuration. (Pre-standard testing by AMF Advanced Systems Laboratories in 1975, post-standard tests by NHTSA at East Liberty Ohio in 1978, and the Transport Canada Tests of 1985 involved only front end crashes and did not measure what happens to passengers in side and roll over accidents).

It is characteristic of front-end crash sled testing to show the 222 seat to its best advantage and to exhibit lap restraints at their most inefficient. Since the front-end accident configuration occurs only about one-third of the time, reasonable efforts to evaluate school bus safety must also include tests involving side, rear and rollover crash forces. Unfortunately, NHTSA has never explained their rationale for failing to perform these tests.

Further, testing only those circumstances where the seat will perform well leads to conclusions that serve to exaggerate the safety of school buses and imply a level of safety that is invalid. Imagine a vehicle that has good steering but faulty brakes. If only the steering is tested the authorities are able to insist that the vehicle is safe. And no matter how many times the vehicle is tested, if only the steering is checked, the myth of safety continues. In the meanwhile, the inadequacy of the braking system continues to cause accident after accident.

Although from the inception, notice of the failure of the 222 seat to properly “compartmentalize” and protect during side impact and roll-over accidents has been detailed to NHTSA in petitions, during public testimony before the Congress and at NHTSA forums, the Agency has persistently ignored the deficiency.

While the motive for NHTSA unrelenting denial of this obvious defect is unclear, the resultant harm caused by “compromised compartmentalization” to the child passengers is most evident. In September of 1999, just as the NHTSA study was beginning, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) issued a report on school bus crashworthiness. The study featured six recent school bus accidents where so called “compartmentalization” was ineffective. In every example the 222 seat failed to contain the passengers. Children were injured and killed as a result of both ejection and being tossed violently within the bus itself. The Board concluded that, “Current compartmentalization is incomplete in that it does not protect school bus passengers during lateral impacts with vehicles of large mass and in rollovers, because in such accidents, passengers do not always remain completely within the seating compartment." The Board went on to point out that these passengers who were propelled from the compartment during collisions were more likely to be injured.

Contributing to compartmentalization failure are such factors as the slippery nature of the school bus seat fabric, the reduced containment because of the smaller size of young children, and the effect of relative opening of the compartment for children seated on or closer to the aisle. In addition, school buses because of their high center of gravity are relatively unstable and subject to frequent rollovers.

The NHTSA Report. In preparing the current Report, to assess crash outcomes, NHTSA analyzed 31 actual crashes. Just nine (29%) were front end. In spite of the fact that 7 out of 10 of these real world accidents were not frontal, NHTSA made no attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of “compartmentalization” in protecting the young passengers in all real world crash configurations. Had NHTSA chosen to evaluate the complete range of all accident possibilities, they would certainly have concluded, as did the NTSB, that “compartmentalization” was compromised and incomplete.

NHTSA did experimentally place 7 instrumented, dummies on a school bus and test crash a 25,000 lb. cab-over truck at 45 mph. into the side of the bus. Curiously, none of the dummies were belted and there was no description of the path of motion and the points of traumatic contact of the dummies during the crash sequence. This failure to compare restraint use with non-restraint is especially significant for those seated on opposite to the impact area where in side impacts passengers are thrown violently from their seats and where belts are most effective in reducing injury.

Inexplicably, only two of the dummies were Side Impact Dummies, instrumented to measure lateral chest and pelvic forces. Even more troubling was the fact that neither of these two Side Impact Dummies capable of measuring lateral forces were placed on the side opposite impact.

The choice of the impacting vehicle must also be questioned. If the bus had been struck at the same spot by an automobile traveling at the same rate of speed, a more dangerous bus rollover was likely and with it the probability of grater injury to passengers. However, because the truck has a high center of gravity comparable to the school bus, rollover was unlikely and crash forces on the dummies was mitigated.

Clearly, NHTSA has demonstrated an all consuming disinterest in the mechanics of the side impact school bus crash. The report devotes only 3 of the 54-page report to the side test. By contrast, the frontal sled tests were carefully evaluated based on different dummy sizes, seat configurations, and restraint systems. Detailed discussions of dummy kinematics for all variables were recorded. In the final analysis however, the information gathered in the frontal sled tests was little different from that developed in the aforementioned pre and post-standard testing in the 1970s. On the other hand, the side impact test was programmed to produce so little information; one must wonder why NHTSA chose to perform the crash and how, based on the paucity of data, they could conclude that restraints were not needed in large school buses.

Cost. On the very first page of the NHTSA Report, the Agency is careful to quote from a June 25, 1998 letter from Congressman James A. Traficant, Jr. admonishing NHTSA to consider the impact on school districts of requiring occupant restraint systems and design and seating capacity changes. While based on recent events the credibility of Mr. Traficant is at best, questionable, NHTSA’s first responsibility is to establish considerations of safety paramount and above concern for the inconvenience of the districts. As regards cost, school bus officials should consider the following costs of “compromised compartmentalization”:

A $28 million accident settlement by the Flagstaff Arizona School District for a school bus rollover accident which caused 31 injuries and 5 ejections. One child suffered a head injury that requires long-term care and another was left a quadriplegic after the accident.
Successful litigation based on the failure of compartmentalization and absence of seat belts with commensurate settlements has occurred in Corpus Christi and Galveston Texas, Cincinnati, Ohio, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Columbia, Maryland, and Memphis, Tennessee.
On March 28, 2000, a train struck the passenger side of a Murray County, Georgia, School District school bus. During the accident sequence, the driver and three children were ejected. Two of the ejected passengers received serious injuries and one was fatally injured. Of the four passengers who remained inside the bus, two were fatally injured, one sustained serious injuries. One, who was restrained by a lap belt, suffered only minor injuries.
The short-term pain and suffering of those injured and recovering.
The lifetime of suffering for those with permanent disabilities.
The cost of litigation should lack of restraints cause injury.
The increased cost of liability insurance.

NHTSA also argues that the installation of seat belts would cause a 17% loss of seating capacity resulting in substantial additional expenses to school districts. They say that this is because three restraints cannot be fitted to a 39” seat. As those familiar with school transportation a fully aware, except for children in the early grades, no 39” seat can accommodate three students. For NHTSA to assume that all school buses are operating at full capacity with 3 to a seat does not represent reality in school transportation.

Conclusion. Once again NHTSA has failed miserably in addressing the problem of “compromised compartmentalization” in school bus side impact and rollover accidents. As a direct result, children will continue to be killed and injured in school bus accidents. The responsibility to correct this well documented inadequacy now resides with the States and with local school districts.

Arthur L. Yeager, DMD, MMH
33 Park Gate Drive
Edison, NJ 08820
(732) 321-0423
Fax (732) 321-0457
alyeager@aol.com

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