School bus flips over on side on Dan Ryan Expressway; 6 youngsters injured
CHICAGO (CBS) -- A school bus flipped over on the Dan Ryan Expressway Tuesday afternoon – leaving six students injured.
The accident happened in the northbound local lanes of the Dan Ryan near 35th Street and Guaranteed Rate Field. The school bus was the only vehicle involved in the rollover accident.
Images from the scene showed the bus flipped over on its side – lying across the shoulder and the embankment alongside the local lanes.
As CBS 2's Noel Brennan reported, it took several tow trucks to pull the bus upright and two it away. The grass on the expressway embankment was left torn up and damaged at the scene.
The bus belonged to City Baptist Schools in Hammond, Indiana. A representative for the schools said there were six students on the bus – and all were taken to area hospitals for observation.
The Fire Department said two accident victims were taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, and three were taken to the University of Chicago's Comer Children's Hospital. Information about the sixth accident victim was not immediately available.
A school administrator said the bus was headed to summer school at the time of the crash, and the students were between the ages 12 and 16.
Parents and staff were at the hospital Tuesday evening, the school said.
The school bus driver declined medical attention.
Meanwhile, once school bus No. 159 was back on its wheels, it turned out that the glass on the door had been shattered.
Annual inspection records of the bus shows it needed to be inspected multiple times before passing Indiana state standards in April.
"It appears that they could probably do a little better job in their maintenance, based on the inspections," said bus safety expert Robert Berkstresser, chief executive officer of Commercial Bus Consult LLC. "In a number of inspections, there were issues with the buses - and they would have to do a re-inspection."
While the cause of the single-vehicle crash has not been determined, Berkstresser says based on the rain Tuesday and the circumstances of the accident, there are some clues as to what may have led to the crash.
"Ultimately, what we find in these conditions, and when these types of things happen, is that the driver failed to adjust for the conditions or the traffic patterns - and what was going on in and around his bus," Berkstresser said.
For hours two of the three northbound lanes of the Dan Ryan were shut down while emergency crews and tow trucks got to work. But by 4 p.m. as the afternoon rush got in gear, traffic was back to moving smoothly on the Dan Ryan.
