Many children killed in another ski trip coach crash

[dandarez]

GTO Scott said:

dandarez said:

Also is coach 'safety' keeping up with the strides made in car safety?
All that glass area above waistline and apparently still no strengthening of roof area - same applies to buses.
To me the coach looks like it has disintegrated at the front. If it was keeping to 'its' speed limit under 50, that is horrendous!

Coach and bus design doesn't really allow for safety. A question I ask every trainee driver I teach is where are the crumple zones on this bus/coach - cue blank looks, head scratching and puzzlement until I explain that the only crumple zone is his/her kneecaps.

st! I might hand in my bus-pass now

On a serious note is there no way a cage structure cannot be built in? Or is it all too costly?

Thinking about it, round here (and they are regularly stopped and taken off the road - but then reappear!) schoolkids are ferried by some operators using 'cast off' double-deckers, usually handpainted and garish (one is purple and looks like household paint from B&Q!! It's not unusual for random stops of them and find brakes are joke, emissions are a joke etc etc.
I wouldn't let my grandchild on one if it was stationary!

[Munter]

dandarez said:

On a serious note is there no way a cage structure cannot be built in? Or is it all too costly?

I suspect cost and/or weight. A full on "cage" type structure would make some of these a bit top heavy I'd have thought. And to make a cage lighter (carbon fibre?) would get more expensive. Although personally I'll take the extra costs given the choice!

In this case though some sort of deformable crash structure on the front of the bus (or on the wall) would have been handy and probably simpler to make. Buses with bonnets?

[mattnunn]

Munter said:

dandarez said:

On a serious note is there no way a cage structure cannot be built in? Or is it all too costly?

I suspect cost and/or weight. A full on "cage" type structure would make some of these a bit top heavy I'd have thought. And to make a cage lighter (carbon fibre?) would get more expensive. Although personally I'll take the extra costs given the choice!

In this case though some sort of deformable crash structure on the front of the bus (or on the wall) would have been handy and probably simpler to make. Buses with bonnets?

I doubt it would have made much difference, looks to me like he hit a flat concrete wall at a speed in excess of 40mph, that's some decelleration, even with a crumple zone. Even with a seatbelt on and no actuall impact injury your internal organs and brain suffer pretty severe jiggery pokery decellerating that quickly.

[Ozzie Osmond]

Munter said:

A full on "cage" type structure would make some of these a bit top heavy I'd have thought. And to make a cage lighter (carbon fibre?) would get more expensive. Although personally I'll take the extra costs given the choice!

Trains have been massively safer in crashes since the change from "body on frame" construction to a "metal tube" monocoque. There were various reasons for this change, not just safety. To get buses sorted out a similar approach would be needed and reducing the size/number of windows in the vehicle. Serious bus crashes seem remarkably rare given the massive mileages driven every year. Perhaps like aircraft it's just not worth making them crash-worthy.

Compulsory seat belts and airbags might help.

[Deva Link]

dandarez said:

On a serious note is there no way a cage structure cannot be built in? Or is it all too costly?
!

Those yellow American school buses are built with a steel ring right around them after there had been a number of serious accidents.

I don't suppose they go very fast, but in an accident at speed the rigidity would probably cause the death of many passengers anyway.

ETA: Here's one that hit a bridge support yesterday (fairly similar to the Swiss crash, but probably at lower speed) it's still pretty wrecked. The driver and one passenger died:

Edited by Deva Link on Wednesday 14th March 17:12

[Seight_Returns]

Without being too ghoulish - I suspect that it's the forces associated with the rapid deceleration that do the harm, rather than the integrity of the vehicle's structure being breached.

The amount of energy that needs to be dissipated in a coach/bus crash is obvilously much more than than a car crash and would collapse any energy absorbing crumple zone very quickly.

[Magog]

Rather than the design and strength of the coach body, it's clearly the design of the tunnel that has led to such a high number of casualties. I'm not sure one needs the benefit of hindsight to say that it's bordering on the criminally negligent.

Edited by Magog on Wednesday 14th March 17:24

[Nickyboy]

Coaches are safe, you are always going to get incidents where something like this is going to be far beyond what they are designed for. I'm pretty sure driving one into a solid concrete block at 50mph is going to fk up any safety features, why? Because the chances of it happening are very remote. Our cars aren't designed to withstand a 120mph impact but they happen.
Structually they are very strong, they have to be. They are not designed to roll over or drive into solid concrete but they can withstand an amount of stress.

This crashed off the M40 at 60mph but was repaired and is back in service, an identical coach as crashed in the tunnel.




Ok it didn't hit anything solid but rolled down an embankment. Another one also tipped over when a passenger grabbed the wheel, no-one was seriously injured in either incident mainly due to the strength of the coach.

The front of the coach is always going to the weakest part due to the huge amount of glass needed, there is no point enclosing it in safety cages as the whole idea is for passengers to see through the glass.

As for the driver falling asleep, i read somewhere the coach had only just its journey just before the tunnel so i doubt falling asleep is an issue.

Looking at this pic



The sheer forces involved to push that through the rear window especially as it wasn't that side that impacted must have been massive.

Edited by Nickyboy on Wednesday 14th March 17:34

[oobster]

That could easily have been a bit of interior trim that was lying around inside the coach after impact and was moved there by the emergency services.

[Degner]

Puggit said:

There are 2 tunnels, one for each direction.

Ah.

i was looking at the pictures of the coach in The Wail though, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2114749/Sw...

and the picture a bit over half way down the page with the caption: "Head-on collision: As the coach is dragged away by a tow truck, the wall it careered into can be clearly seen".

Surely that isn't the actual wall it hit, 'cos otherwise the coach must have come pretty much to a dead halt from 60ish mph? If it is, then surely the coach has withstood the impact pretty well?

Either way, I'm still wondering if the design of the refuge has done it's job by arresting the vehicle as well as possible without launching it into other lanes or traffic.

[Puggit]

Tunnel CCTV apparently shows the bus was not speeding and that seatbelts were being worn.

[JonnyFive]

Puggit said:

Tunnel CCTV apparently shows the bus was not speeding and that seatbelts were being worn.

Yet, I bet the outcome at the end will be blamed on speed. I read (Granted, on the Mail website) someone is already saying the coach was speeding..

[Pesty]

Rollcage said:

Having a lay-by right in front of the brick wall doesn't seem the most sensible piece of road layout I've ever seen.

I could be wrong because I have not been in that particular tunnel but I have been in many accross europe.

Many have cut outs like that in teh walls which act as 'shelters' or safe areas if you break down and I belive are often labled as such.

[Great Pretender]

DJRC said:

24 kids dead now.

Tunnels in Europe are quite different to the tunnels we have in the UK. They are much more complicated than we have in the UK, often with many different exits and entries feeding in and leading off, at times on different sides of the same carriageway. Much can feel counter intuitive a lot of the time and can be downright disconcerting at others. The longer ones can also be monotonous and hypnotic.

This.

[Nickyboy]

Degner said:

and the picture a bit over half way down the page with the caption: "Head-on collision: As the coach is dragged away by a tow truck, the wall it careered into can be clearly seen".

Surely that isn't the actual wall it hit, 'cos otherwise the coach must have come pretty much to a dead halt from 60ish mph? If it is, then surely the coach has withstood the impact pretty well?

This is the pic with the coach in situ



Looking at the damage it seems to have impacted and then lifted up at the rear pushing the top part of the front further into the concrete, look at the side on pics, the top section seems to be damaged a good 6ft further back than the bumper where the strength of the chassis would be.

The plastic sticking thru the rear window is the luggage rack that runs the length of the coach

[FarleyRusk]

Have to admit to having "something in my eye" when watching this on the Dutch news earlier. It's a very tragic story.

Some key points-

- The coach had just started its journey back to Belgium, so tiredness probably not a factor.
- The coach was reportedly quite new and not some fixed-up and resprayed wreck
- The first guys at the scene were regular members of the public and they were in tears telling how the seats had come loose and were all thrown forwards to the front of the bus by the impact and kids were holding on to each other and crying for help
- reportedly the coach hit the RHS inside lane kerb, drifted out and then back again into the safety bay and stopped when it hit the wall (can coaches have tank slappers)?
- Most of the victims are from a school just over the border and virtually the whole class has been wiped out a teachers too
- Swiss authorities are considering 3 possible causes; human error, driver illness or mechanical failure - not to mention the stupid tunnel design


I have boys of skiing age myself and my thoughts are with relatives of the deceased and the kids who survived and their families. :-(

[Frankeh]

I'm guessing lots of head injuries against the seats in front? Maybe the deceleration alone killed a few as well?

Otherwise I'm not really seeing much that'd kill other than the first probably 9 seats.

[JonnyFive]

Surely it didn't impact that wall then, they wouldn't be dragging it out of the wall.. They'd be getting people out/chopping it up to get them out? Would take something pretty big to tow it out of a concrete wall, and I'd imagine the first things on scene would be ambulances/police cars so nothing strong enough to tow?

It strikes me as it might have got a slide on, hit the wall at an angle, gone upwards and hit the roof and ended up at the side scraping along?

[Mojocvh]

Great Pretender said:

DJRC said:

24 kids dead now.

Tunnels in Europe are quite different to the tunnels we have in the UK. They are much more complicated than we have in the UK, often with many different exits and entries feeding in and leading off, at times on different sides of the same carriageway. Much can feel counter intuitive a lot of the time and can be downright disconcerting at others. The longer ones can also be monotonous and hypnotic.

This.

Drove down a tunnel once in Norway that had been dug under a V fiord.
No lane changes of filters but the sense of isolation and disorientation was very strong indeed.
At the bottom when we started to climb up all you could focus on was the exit, like a pinhead [so it seemed] above.

[Mojocvh]

Nightmare.

"telling how the seats had come loose and were all thrown forwards"

almost an airliner crash in effect, except the seat rails break first and you get "clumps" busting out from the aircraft's structure. Guess the seats rails/supports have a lower G rating.