10:26 AM MST on Friday, September 23, 2005

By MICHAEL GRABELL / The Dallas Morning News

A bus bound for Dallas exploded early Friday on traffic-packed Interstate 45 in Wilmer, killing at least 24 mostly elderly nursing home patients being evacuated from Houston as Hurricane Rita approached.

WAYNE D. COWEY / Special to DMN

Witnesses reported smoke and fire from the bus before a series of explosions.

Thirteen others were injured and taken to area hospitals, most of them to Parkland Memorial Hospital's burn unit, said Capt. Jesse Garcia of Dallas Fire Rescue.

"It caught fire and pulled over, and it was just a difficult to get all these cases out," Capt. Garcia said. "We were literally dragging them out."

Dr. Paul Pepe, chairman of emergency medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center, said the nine survivors at Parkland ranged in age from 70 to 101. They arrived with minor cuts and abrasions; one was admitted with severe smoke inhalation. Four patients were treated and released from Baylor University Medical Center.

The bus was headed north about 6:30 a.m. when a witness, who said he had been driving for 20 hours in the jam-packed I-45 corridor, saw it pass his car with smoke pouring out of the rear on the driver's side. About two minutes later, the bus exploded.

Sgt. Don Peritz, spokesman for the Dallas County Sheriff's Department, said the bus was coming from the Brighton Gardens nursing home in Bellaire, near Houston. The Department of Aging and Disability Services' online database showed that the home was caring for four patients who had been transferred there because of Hurricane Katrina.

Meghan K. Lublin, a spokeswoman for Virginia-based Sunrise Senior Living, which owns Brighton Gardens, said the bus was transporting 38 senior citizens and six employees.

Erv Roorda, spiritual care coordinator at Vista Care, a hospice service, said his staff was contracted to help the evacuees who were on the bus to settle in at two Sunrise nursing homes: The Forum on Park Lane in Dallas and Edenbrook of Plano on Midway Road.

"These are people who were facing terminal illnesses or long-term illnesses," he said.

Sgt. Peritz said the bus driver was not injured and helped with the rescue efforts.

The problem may have originated with the vehicle's brakes. A fire broke out and apparently spread quickly, igniting one of the senior citizen's oxygen tanks, Sgt. Peritz said.

Dr. Pepe said one of the victims told him that they stopped at 5:55 a.m. to change a tire. After they got back on the road, people started signaling that smoke was coming from the back of the bus. They pulled over and began trying to put the fire out, he said.

The explosion caused a 17-mile backup on a freeway that was already heavily congested with evacuees from the Gulf Coast.

According to David Robertson, a Dallas County deputy sheriff on the scene, the bus left a lengthy skidmark on I-45. A piece of metal was lodged in the right rear wheel of the bus, and crash investigators believe this caused the tires to lock up.

The right rear wheel was burned all the way down to the rim, and the tires were completely melted away from the rear.

Mr. Robertson said the scene on the bus was horrific.

"They were all on top of each other trying to get out," he said. "It's pretty bad."

A witness to the accident, Fred Whitte, 74, lives on the service road near Mars Road.

"I was watching it burn and wham, I could feel it on my back," he said. "The whole freeway was packed. I thought boy, is this ever going to end."

Mr. Whitte said five or six carloads of people stopped and started removing people from the bus and laying them on the road before the bus exploded. He said that he heard at least one big explosion and two smaller ones. Charred pieces of the bus shot across the northbound service road and into the white metal fence around Texas Star Truck Sales nearby, he said.

Two to three minutes after he saw the smoke, Roberto Orozco, 31, said he saw the bus pull over and people running out looking for help.

Mr. Orozco pulled over and joined others who were running back toward the bus to help when he saw it explode.

"I came here running to help somebody and then I saw the first explosion," he said. He said there were two explosions a few minutes apart and the bus was engulfed in flames.

"A lot of fire in the bus," said Mr. Orozco, holding his 2-year old child. "Old ladies crying and crying and crying."

Mr. Orozco said he managed to help two people.

Bellaire Mayor Cindy Siegel said the charter bus was one of two that left Brighton Gardens about 3 p.m. Thursday. Nursing home officials decided to move the residents when it appeared that Rita might hit the Houston-Galveston area directly.

Eighty percent of Bellaire is in the 100-year flood plain. The city of 16,000 surrounded by Houston experienced extreme flooding during Tropical Storm Allison in 2001.

"We had concerns that if we flooded again or during the winds we wouldn't be able to respond," the mayor said.

There was no mandatory evacuation order, but Brighton Gardens officials decided to ask family members to come get residents more able to move and then to put those who needed special assistance on a bus.

Sunrise Senior Living officials said they were contacting relatives of the victims.

"Our primary concern is for the safety of our residents and we are shocked and saddened that this even occurred during our evacuation," said Paul Klaassen, chairman and CEO. "We are fully cooperating with authorities investigating this incident to determine its cause."

By 8 a.m., the blackened and charred bus remained along the highway were it came to a halt just north of Mars Road at I-45. A large triage center was set up to treat the wounded before they were carried to hospitals, and a large blue tarp was laid out over some of the dead.

Traffic began moving again around 8 a.m. as it was diverted off of I-45 to access roads and other routes.

Authorities decided to clear the site before National Transportation Safety officials arrived, leaving the bodies of the victims covered with bright blue tarp on the bus. They said they were concerned about the potential traffic tie-ups on I-45 as thousands of Rita evacuees continue to move north into Dallas.

The bus was taken to a county-owned lot in southern Dallas County for further investigation.

WFAA-TV reporter Cynthia Vega, Dallas Morning News reporter Herb Booth, Kathy A. Goolsby and Donna Wisdom and DallasNews.com reporters Kimberly Durnan and Matt Mosley contributed to this report.