In a prepared statement, Ford said "substantial government data show these vehicles provide a high level of safety comparable to other vehicles in a wide range of conditions, including rollovers." Seventy-one percent of deaths in 15-passenger vans happen in rollover crashes, compared to 48 percent for all vehicles, according to a Courier Journal analysis of fatal crashes nationwide since 2001. “This compares to ratios of close to two for SUVs and Minivans, 1.6 for pickup trucks and 1.2 for passenger cars.”Īnd those rollovers aren't just more likely, they're also more deadly. “The odds of a rollover for a 15-passenger van at its designed seating capacity, is more than five times the odds of a rollover when the driver is the only occupant in the van,” NHTSA said in 2004. And they're more dangerous if people use them as the manufacturers intended. The bottom line: Any vehicle can roll over in some circumstances, but the big vans are much more likely to do so. It's also harder for the driver to keep control if a tire blows, as happened in the crash that killed Michalanne Salliotte. NHTSA found the van's center of gravity shifts up and to the rear when fully loaded, raising the likelihood of rollover if the driver makes a tight turn or swerves for any reason. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) drew similar conclusions when it analyzed van crashes in 2001 after several rollovers involving college students made headlines. One ad boasted the Dodge Ram Wagon could carry “15 happy campers.”īut as the vans fill up, rollovers become more likely.Ĭourier Journal analyzed millions of crash records from six states between 20, finding older vans that lack modern safety features have about a 52 percent chance of rolling in a crash when fully loaded and driving at highway speeds. “To keep everything proper, we did away with all of our older buses and went with the vans.”Īll they did was trade one danger for another.īuyers were encouraged to fill every seat. “The law and the insurance company got really hard on the larger buses,” Roberts said. Louisville-area church leaders thought the vans would be safer, said Jack Roberts, pastor of Louisville's Maryville Baptist Church. Many churches turned to 15-passenger vans, said Curt Mitchell, of Carpenter Bus Sales in Franklin, Tennessee, a major church transportation sales company. The Carrollton tragedy prompted more safety features in newer buses and regulatory reform: Kentucky ordered all private buses, including church buses, to undergo annual inspections.īut old school buses soon fell out of favor. Operating costs were high, and congregations struggled to find parishioners with newly required commercial driver's licenses. history when a drunken driver slammed into a bus carrying 67 members of the Radcliff First Assembly of God on their way home from an Ohio amusement park.
Those dangers conspired to cause one of the worst bus tragedies in U.S. Kentucky, meanwhile, had no effective laws or regulations aimed at ensuring church buses were adequately maintained or safely operated. Echos of the Carrollton crashĬhurches around Louisville and across Kentucky commonly use the vans, just as they employed surplus school buses 30 years ago, when 27 people died in a fiery crash on Interstate 71 near Carrollton on May 14, 1988.įor years before the Carrollton deaths, federal officials and industry experts also issued repeated warnings about inherent dangers in the old school bus' design: an unprotected gas tank. Salliotte is one of 600 people killed in single-vehicle rollovers involving 15-passenger vans since safety warnings were first issued 17 years ago. Yet many churches around the country still use the old vans to haul kids to swimming pools, take parishioners to services or deliver members to conferences and revival meetings.
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