School bus crashes: A rare, but frightening, reality on London-area roads (2024)

More than 50,000 students, enough to fill a small city, take buses to school every day in the London area, making thousands of trips every year without incident. But serious crashes do occur. LFP’s Brian Williams reports on school bus collisions across the region in recent years

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TUESDAY: Six children were taken to hospitals, including one who was flown to London by air ambulance, after a bus carrying children to Woodstock Christian School rolled over in a single-vehicle crash at a rural intersection south of Woodstock in Oxford County. None of the injuries was life-threatening, authorities said.

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FEB. 12, 2024:Two separate collisions that involved school buses happened in the region on Monday Feb. 12. A 75-year-old woman was hit by a bus while she was walking at a downtown St. Thomas intersection, the city’s police department said. Elizabeth Anderson suffered serious injuries and died the following day in a London hospital. None of the seven students on the bus was injured. In another collision, in Middlesex Centre, Ontario Provincial Police said a school bus driver was taken to hospital after their bus collided with another vehicle. The crash happened north of London around 4 p.m. at Ilderton Road and Adelaide Street. The driver was taken to hospital as a precaution, but no further details of the driver’s injuries were released.

JAN. 16, 2024: There were 35 students aboard a school bus when it collided with a minivan in South-West Oxford Township on the morning of Jan. 16, OPP said. The collision happened at 8:15 a.m. at the Salford Road and Zenda Line, southeast of Ingersoll, and no injuries were reported because of the crash, police said.

NOVEMBER 2023: Two separate crashes involving school buses happened on the morning of Nov. 2. The first occurred in a rural area of Oxford County not far from Tillsonburg and involved an empty school bus colliding with a passenger van, killing a person in the latter vehicle, police said. The bus driver was uninjured. In separate incident in Stratford, a bus carrying 11 children veered off John Street, causing significant damage to the bus’s front-end, police said. Two children received minor injuries and the bus driver was taken to hospital as a precaution, Stratford police said. The bus driver was charged with careless driving, police said.

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MAY 2023: A police officer and a bus driver were killed when a school bus collided with an unmarked police vehicle on the morning of Monday May 29, police said. Police said the bus and car collided at the intersection of Oxford Road 33 and Highway 59, a rural community northwest of Woodstock. Bus driver David James Stewart and Det.-Const. Steven Tourangeau were the sole occupants of the vehicles and both died at the scene, police said.

DECEMBER 2022: Three people were taken to hospital when three vehicles collided on the morning of Dec. 19. The crash involved two passenger vehicles and a school bus on Elginfield Road between Adelaide Street and Highway 23, northeast of London. Two children were aboard the bus at the time of the crash, one of whom was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, police said. An occupant in each of the passenger vehicles was also taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries, the OPP said.

JUNE 2017: Eight people were sent to hospital following a crash between a school bus, a dump truck and an SUV on the afternoon of June 7, northeast of London at the intersection of Nissouri Road and Evelyn Drive, police said. Six John Paul II Catholic secondary school students, aged 14 to 19, and the SUV driver were treated for non-life-threatening injuries, while the bus driver, a 40-year-old London woman, was flown to hospital, Middlesex OPP said. The bus driver was charged with turning into the path of approaching vehicle, police said.

bwilliams@postmedia.com

@BrianWatLFPress

The Local Journalism Initiative is funded by the Government of Canada

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