Wreck prompts safety push

TOLEDO, Ohio – John Betts can’t help but stare at the charcoal drawing above his desk, the one with the spunky baseball player smirking with a cap pulled tightly on his head.

For him, that smile is a reminder of happier times before a bus toppled off a freeway overpass in Atlanta a year ago, killing his son David Betts and four other Bluffton University ballplayers.

The grinning face in the portrait is an inspiration, too, in his battle to force the bus industry to improve safety on long-haul buses, the kind that carry children to soccer tournaments and school trips to Washington.

“Take a look at that smile,” Betts said recently. “It’s infectious. I don’t see how you can get bitter.”

Betts, a father of four, made a pledge to his son’s teammates less than an hour after identifying his 20-year-old son’s body at the morgue that something good would come out of the accident.

“There had to be some purpose to this,” he said.

Already, his persistence is making progress.

A bill he pushed for is pending before Congress and would require seat belts on charter buses and passenger buses that travel from state to state. The legislation also would require changes designed to prevent passengers from being thrown out windows and strengthen bus roofs.

“I don’t think you have to lose a son or daughter or family member to know this is the right thing to do,” said Betts, who started reading everything he could about bus safety a week after burying his son.

He created a Web site — www.motorcoachsafetynow.com — to educate others about the bill before Congress. He is convinced that seat belts would have saved the five players from the northwest Ohio school and others who have died in rollovers.

The bus industry is supporting a competing bill that calls for more crash test data to determine whether seat belts and the other changes would make buses safer.

“When we’re talking about passenger safety, there’s no guessing allowed,” said Victor Parra, president of the United Motorcoach Association. “Let’s do it in a way that makes sense.”

There’s no proof that seat belts would make buses safer and some studies have questioned how effective they would be, Parra said.

“I’m not against seat belts,” he said. “Nobody in the industry is against seat belts.”

Kimberly Askins is certain her son, Cody Holp, would be alive if seat belts were on the charter bus carrying the Bluffton team.

“It’s something that should have been done a long time ago,” she said. “There’s no excuse.”

Holp, who was sitting a row in front of David Betts, flew through a window and was crushed by the bus when it landed on the freeway.

The National Transportation Safety Board for years has recommended improved restraint systems. Buses in Australia and much of Europe have seat belts.

“It’s not like we are asking the industry to come up with technology that hasn’t been invented,” said Jacqueline Gillan, vice president of Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.

The European-made bus carrying the Bluffton team was designed to have seat belts but did not because restraints aren’t required in the U.S.

About 631 million passenger trips are made by motor coach each year, according to the American Bus Association. Federal figures show an average of about 23 bus deaths per year over the past decade. The bus industry says the figure is proof that buses are safe.

Investigators have said the driver of the Bluffton bus apparently mistook an exit ramp for a highway lane. The driver and his wife also died.

Each year, northern schools travel to Florida to play baseball during spring break. Bluffton is making the trip again, this time by plane, and will open the season today, exactly a year since the crash.