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Show UTAH HISTORICAL QUARTERLY disfigured, but with plastic surgery and Pictures of eighteen of the restorative types of procedures all the injured twenty-four victims were turned out very well.”25 Some of the students published in the December 2, remained his patients for the next two 1938, issue of the Salt Lake decades. Tribune. This was the worst school bus accident up until that time in American history and still remains the worst bus-train accident. Two later accidents that exceeded the death toll for school bus accidents both happened in Kentucky. In 1958 a school bus near Prestonsburg, Kentucky, collided with a tow truck and plunged into a river, drowning the driver and twenty-six students. Twentytwo other students managed to swim to safety.26 In 1988, near Carrollton, Kentucky, a drunk driver in a pickup truck collided head-on with a former school bus being used as a church bus. The accident initially caused only minor injuries, but the bus caught fire and twenty-seven people, mostly children, died trying to use the narrow rear exit. Only seven people escaped.27 Other train accidents have killed many more, usually when a train with passengers derailed or two trains collided. The nation already knew that it had a problem with school bus accidents at railroad crossings. In the previous ten years, four school buses had been hit, killing a number of people. The public conversation immediately 24 “Damage Suits For $365,500 Filed by Bus Victims’ Parents,” The Ute Sentinel, February 24, 1939. Barton, ed., “The Memoirs of Dr. Paul,” 75. 26 “Kentucky: National Guard History Museum—Prestonsburg School Bus Disaster,” <http://kynghistory.ky.gov/history/4qtr/addinfo/pburgbusdisaster.htm>, accessed November 5, 2012. 27 “10 years ago, 27 people died in a fiery crash,” 25 166 |
