I woke up to the pictures of this horrible tragedy early this morning, and, as details have emerged throughout the day, I simply can’t get them out of my mind:
The flight from the danger posed by Hurricane Rita turned deadly early Friday as a bus filled with elderly evacuees from the Houston area burst into flames on traffic-packed Interstate 45, leaving as many as 24 people dead, according to local officials.
“Deputies were unable to get everyone off the bus,” Dallas County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Don Peritz said. He said he believed 24 people were killed, but that number could change.
Separately, the Dallas County Fire Marshal’s office told NBC News that 24 were killed in the tragedy.
The bus was carrying 38 residents and six employees of the Brighton Gardens nursing home in Bellaire, according to Sunrise Senior Living, the McLean, Va., company that owns the center.
The National Transportation Safety Board dispatched an investigation team from its office in Austin. But Peritz said early indications were that the bus, which had been on the road since Thursday, caught fire because of mechanical problems, possibly overheated brakes. Then passengers’ oxygen tanks started exploding, turning the vehicle into an inferno, he said.
Absolutely awful. One wonders how much worse this could get. And what other tragedies could be on the way. One only hopes that the authorities along the Gulf Coast have prepared as well as possible for Rita’s impact and that the people who haven’t evacuated have taken the necessary precautions to keep themselves safe.