Public Safety: When Oversight is Asleep at the Wheel

How hard can it be? An application comes across the desk of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration for a new bus service, Iguala Busmex, operating out of Houston, Texas. You are the clerk. (Albeit you probably have a fancier title, since you work for a bureaucracy.) Just type in the address on the application and cross reference it with your software. Or just as easily, type it into a search engine. Gee! Isn’t it the exact same address for Angel Tours, also based in Houston? Now, type in the name of the applicant and owner. Wow! Isn’t that the same name of the man who owned Angel Tours? What a damn coincidence! Who would have thought of it? Pick up the phone. Call the man. Tell him that if you locate even one of his unsafe vehicles on the road, a Texas State Trooper will visit him with a pair of handcuffs.

Angel de la Torres, a.ka. Angel de la Muerte, found it very easy to take a company that was ordered out of service for safety violations on June 23rd, reapply for his new bus service on June 26th,, and to continue on with business as usual. America.... land of opportunity! Call it a recapped right front tire on the bus that caused an initial toe-tagging count of fifteen deaths in the plunge to the ground below when the bus bucked right off the interstate after the tire blew. That is what NTSB spokeswoman Debbie Hersman stated was the cause, at a hastily assembled news conference. But that nice little individual and rather sterile fact ignores root cause analysis, folks.

I am plain spoken and prefer the simple truth. Institutional negligence is to blame for the many deaths of the Vietnamese religious pilgrims who boarded Iguala Busmex for what ended up being a road trip to the morgue. The bus operator was in violation of both federal and state law. According to the Fort Worth Star Telegram, critics reported that federal and state officials lack the necessary authority to shut down business' that fail inspections. Why is that? If so, it seems about as logical as investing in a toothless, arthritic hound dog to guard your home. What kind of “watch dog” do we have here? Oversight and authority count for nothing if enforcement doesn’t keep these traveling caravans of death off the road. The issue is enforcement. Iguala Busmex was on the road illegally. Enforcement failed. It seems that the levied fine of $3,460 could have paid for a few tanks of gas and a couple of visits for visual confirmation that Mr. Torres was not being a sneaky little boy.

Years ago Greyhound had a nice slogan. It was “Leave the driving to us.” I once took their bus from the hill country of Fredricksburg back to Dallas. It was stress free and actually enjoyable. Somehow I trust Greyhound. But shouldn’t we also be able to trust that any bus service on the road is functioning in safe manner?

What needs to be done to improve the efficiency and enforcement capabilities of agencies entrusted with public safety on the roads? If they require more financial assistance, let’s release the funds to them. Do they require more field agents on the ground to keep the bus barns locked until all violations are rectified? But if this is just a cluster because of a series of negligent actions, someone needs to catch a bit of hell. The death toll now stands at 17 and 18 passengers remain hospitalized, some with critical injuries.

Tammy Swofford
tammyswofford@yahoo.com