Charlotte FD gives more publicity to school bus crashes

In the last month, CMS buses were involved in at least five traffic accidents that were serious enough for emergency officials to alert the public and, in some cases, send students to the hospital. The most recent was Monday on Steele Meadow Road, though no students were injured in that accident. Captain Rob Brisley of the Charlotte Fire Department says fender benders and minor dust-ups involving school buses are common on Charlotte roads. The difference lately is the fire department has begun publicizing them widely through email and Twitter. "The fire department has been running 80-90 thousand calls a year over the past few years, and many involve a bus," says Brisley. "But the volume of calls to those type incidents is not increasing. It's just that we're able to get that information about the school bus crash or transit incident more quickly, correctly and efficiently." CMS has about 1,200 school buses on the roads and says total accidents have been declining since 2006. However, there was a spike in May with 38 accidents compared to 31 in May of 2008. CMS says, this year, 14 percent of its bus drivers were involved in an accident that could have been prevented.