posted 10-02-2005 01:36 AM         

God bless all those who perished and their families.

How escape from Rita turned into deathtrap

Eyewitness accounts retrace what happened before bus fire killed 23

10:54 PM CDT on Saturday, October 1, 2005

By MICHAEL GRABELL and TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News

Inside the bus, thick black smoke seemed to rise up from the back of the cabin like a storm surge, swallowing feeble patients from the suburban Houston nursing home.

After 15 hours on the road away from Hurricane Rita, some passengers raced as best they could on weak legs as rescuers carried, hugged and threw others over their shoulders to get them off.

Half the 45 people on board made it. Twenty-three did not.

A week after the worst Texas bus accident in 50 years turned the chartered motor coach into a funeral pyre, some survivors, passers-by, police and firefighters are still grappling with what happened on the fateful drive from the Brighton Gardens nursing home.

They started Thursday afternoon, Sept. 22, as Rita reeled like a circular saw toward the coast.

With dire warnings of the hurricane and memories of the ghastly drownings some nursing home patients suffered during Hurricane Katrina, local officials had ordered Brighton Gardens evacuated.

The frail patients, many in wheelchairs, waited outside the red-brick nursing home in low-lying Bellaire. Their ages averaged 85.

They were great-grandmothers and war veterans, retired secretaries and shipping executives. Many were born on farms and cattle ranches when Texas became oil country. They had seen a century. And now they had broken hips, breathing problems and Alzheimer's.

It was 3 p.m.

One by one, Bellaire firefighters helped the 37 patients onto the coach bus. Some had to be carried, the use of their limbs lost long ago. Others with dementia may not have even known where they were.

Some required heavy oxygen bottles to be hauled on board. Nursing home staff folded up their wheelchairs and stowed them in compartments underneath.

Billie Barton, 88, was one of the first on board. She liked sitting near the front and found an aisle seat behind the bus driver.

The elderly patients worried about what happened in New Orleans and were relieved to get on the bus and go. The seats looked worn.

In a half-hour, they were on their way.

The bus ride was quiet. Billie sat and sat. She thought about her roommate, Mattie Bynum, who turned 100 in June and was seated in back.

She just wanted to hurry up and get to Dallas. She had a box of food but didn't eat it.

A few rows back, Lillie Spies and Martha Talbot chatted about their old church, St. Patrick's in Houston.

"There's a pretty flower," Lillie said, pointing out geraniums and chrysanthemums out the window.

She tried to sleep but couldn't.

Others read books and glanced at pictures in the morning's newspaper. Many stared blankly at the traffic that turned a gray interstate into a clog of beige, red, silver, black and teal cars and trucks.

Every now and then, nursing home caregivers walked up and down the aisles talking to patients, giving them water and their medications.

The bus driver never really talked much like some bus drivers do.

He stopped at least once, possibly in Bryan, to pick up more oxygen bottles for the patients.

Hours passed in awful traffic. Day turned to night on Interstate 45.

Outside Corsicana in a little railroad town called Rice, the passengers heard a thump, thump, thump.

The bus stopped in a shoulder-less construction zone just short of the Calhoun Street bridge. The bus driver and some staff members got off.

"There's something wrong, someplace," Lillie said, turning to Martha.

Harry Wilson – partially paralyzed from two strokes – borrowed a cellphone and called his daughter, Eileen, in Houston to tell her the bus had a flat tire. He and his good friend Natalie Lenzner were OK.

It was 4:15 a.m.

Outside, a Rice police officer called a mechanic. A worker from K&S Tire Towing & Recovery in Corsicana drove out and changed the tire.

After fixing the flat, the 55-passenger bus continued on its way. It took them the better part of two hours to travel the 30 miles to Wilmer.

From the bus windows, passengers noticed motorists waving frantically, pointing to the back of the bus and trying to get the driver's attention.

The bus was smoking, they yelled.

One man flashed his lights and honked his horn after seeing the wheel rim glowing red and sparking.

The bus driver, Juan Robles Gutierrez, stopped in the roadway, and the man told him about the wheel.

Mr. Robles pulled the bus to the right shoulder.

By then, the right rear tire was an orange fireball against a pitch-black sky. Flames lashed the back of the bus up to the windows. Small fires smoldered in the grass strip dividing the highway and service road.

Mr. Robles came back to the third row near where schoolyard sweethearts, Carlo and Jean Aiello, now in their 80s, were sitting.

He pulled up the bus mat, and his face grew worried.

"Oh my God, the bus is on fire!" he screamed. "Get out! Get out!"

Mr. Robles bear-hugged Billie and carried her out to the grass.

Jean wobbled on her rubbery legs and hollered for Carlo.

Firefighters rescued Harry.

"The fire department pulled me out, literally, like a newborn baby," he would later say.

As Mr. Robles and rescuers carried others over their shoulder, passengers behind them crammed into the aisle in the center of the bus. Many in back remained in their seats, screaming and unable to get up.

The bus heated up like an incinerator, the interior reaching about 1,500 degrees. It reeked of burning rubber. Seating cushions flared, releasing toxic formaldehyde.

Passers-by broke bus windows and threw jugs of water on the flames.

Juanita Palacios, 28, was right behind the bus and smelled the heavy stench of rubber. She stopped and ran barefoot from her car to help the elderly passengers jumping out with smoke trailing from their clothes.

"You are hurting me," one passenger told her.

The heat burning her feet, Ms. Palacios grabbed Harry's hand, which was burned and cut with glass.

He yelled about the oxygen tanks.

Motorists called 911. The first call came in at 6:06 a.m.

"Yes, I'm coming down 45," a man told the dispatcher. "There's a bus on fire with people still in it."

"They haven't gotten – are they trapped in there?" the female dispatcher asked.

"I guess so because the bus is burning up on the right-hand side. The tire blew up, and they're on fire."

Lillie was in the fourth row. At 5-foot-8 ½, she was taller than the smoke and waded through the blackening cloud.

"When I get real excited, I can walk without a wheelchair," she said later.

Two men met her at the door. One grabbed her arms, the other her legs. Her feet dangled, and her toes kept hitting the floorboards.

A sheriff's deputy shined a flashlight through the smoke to guide the helpless passengers out.

Thick black vapors filled Gloria Putney's esophagus. The 84-year-old was in the sixth row and may have been one of the last passengers off the bus.

In the distance, Lillie heard a freight train whistle.

Then she heard the boom.

Outside, Robert Orozco, 31, who had been driving with his family 20 hours from Houston, had been running to the fire and stopped short.

High, brightly colored flames swallowed the bus. The heat doubled to 3,000 degrees. Hunks of metal shot in the air, ricocheting off the white metal fence of the nearby Texas Star Truck Sales yard. Charred chunks of the foam seat cushions blew across the service road.

Fred Witte, 74, was standing outside in his mobile home just off the interstate and felt the heat on his back.

"Car 11 just had a massive explosion!" a sheriff's deputy screamed on his police radio, describing the message he received from another patrol car.

Lying on the grass, Harry thought it looked like a Roman candle. Rescuers rushed to pull him and others farther from the inferno.

"Be advised, we are going to have multiple elderly victims," an out-of-breath deputy radioed somberly. "The bus has exploded. I don't know how many people are left on board."

"Ten-four," the dispatcher said. "And you're requesting mutual aid from Dallas Fire Department?"

"Ten-four," the deputy said. "Give me everybody you can."

With the roads shut down, ambulances from at least four agencies came the wrong way in the northbound lanes of I-45.

Paramedics began shuttling patients on stretchers into ambulances. Firefighters doused the blaze.

Nurses and aid workers traded tearful hugs. They started to second-guess the decision to leave Bellaire.

Patients lay weary on the grass. Billie's chest and back ached from the rescue. Ants crawled up her leg. Many patients cried. Some sat with their backs against a van.

Lillie looked for Martha. Billie looked for Mattie. Harry looked for Natalie.

But none of their friends ever came off.

Across the country in Arizona, Deborah Roesch turned on TV and saw her mother, Jean, dazed and staggering on the side of the road. She didn't see her father, Carlo, and was hysterical, waiting for hours to learn that he survived.

One by one, ambulances left with sirens blaring.

Half-hidden by clouds, a reddish-orange sun began to rise, revealing the carnage left in the bus's blackened skeleton.

Firefighters climbed up on its frame, carefully pulling a blue tarp over the 23 left on board.

Staff writers Jason Trahan, Holly Becka, Tim Wyatt, Tiara Ellis, Donna Logan Wisdom, Angela Shah and Colleen McCain Nelson contributed to this report.