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Florida Accident Removes Carpenter School Buses From Service

The State Department of Education today removed more than 300 school buses from service as a precautionary measure because of possibly defective welds along the vehicles’ rooflines. The chain of events leading to today’s decision began with a recent Florida accident involving a bus built by Indiana-based Carpenter Bodyworks, which went out of business five years ago.  The South Carolina Department of Education operates 1,196 Carpenter buses, which are between 16 and 21 years old and are spread throughout the state. The SDE began inspecting all Carpenter buses this week shortly after receiving guidelines on what kinds of problems to look for and where to look for them.  Those inspections did find some cracked welds, enough to prompt Transportation Director Donald Tudor to pull affected buses from service.  Spare buses will be used until repairs can be made, although temporary disruptions in service may occur because not many spare buses are available.

Tudor said that more detailed inspections, which require removing the buses’ interior and exterior “skins,” will be done throughout the upcoming summer vacation, with repairs made where needed.  Tudor added that repairs to about 100 of the 300 buses pulled today could be fairly simple, and those vehicles might be returned to service within days. Tudor said the buses were taken out of service as a precaution, although it could not immediately be determined if the problems were serious enough to cause critical structural damage during an accident.  The Florida accident was an example of that kind of damage, although no students were aboard and the driver was not seriously injured.

The Carpenter bus inspections and repairs are complicated by the fact that the manufacturer no longer exists.  The usual course of action would call for a bus manufacturer to warn all bus owners and recall vehicles for repairs.  In this case, however, Carpenter went out of business in 1998.  The SDE has asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to study the problem and make repair recommendations.  Tudor said the State Department of Education would use NHTSA’s recommendations in making bus roof repairs over the summer. Carpenter buses met federal safety standards at the time of purchase, although all South Carolina buses bought since 1988 have solid steel “ribs” that protect passengers as opposed to the Carpenter design that has the bus roof welded to the sidewalls.