No injuries in school bus slide-off

OSBURN — All occupants of a Wallace School District school bus were safely evacuated Tuesday after it partially slid off a road in Osburn.

Osburn Police Chief Darell Braaten and Shoshone County Public Works Director Jim Cason reported to the News-Press that on Tuesday around 4 p.m., a school bus carrying approximately 13 children — 14 occupants total counting the driver — from Silver Hills Elementary was traveling up Sunny Slopes Road when it encountered heavy amounts of snow and ice.

The bus driver was just behind another vehicle on the hill when the front vehicle lost traction about three-quarters of the way up, which then forced the bus to stop and lose its forward momentum. This stoppage rendered the automatic chains on the school bus ineffective.

With the chains not doing their job, the slick conditions then caused the bus to slide backward. The bus driver, Carla Bassemier, attempted to stop the slide, but it was too late and the front end of the vehicle ended up swinging to the west side of the road and hanging over the side of the hill. With the vehicle partially in the air, the occupants stayed put and awaited help.

The front-passenger side tire was the farthest hanging off, which caused the rear-driver side to rise slightly off the ground.

Chief Braaten arrived on scene shortly after the incident occurred and parked his patrol car on the hill just above the bus’s location. While speaking with the driver of the bus, Braaten’s car was also affected by the slick conditions and slid into a snowbank on the east side of the hill while he was out of it.

After quickly sizing up the status of the bus in relation to its precarious position on the hill, an evacuation of the occupants was safely conducted through the rear exit of the vehicle with no injuries being incurred.

Once everyone was safe, units with the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office and the Shoshone County Public Works department assisted in the retrieval of both Braaten’s patrol car and the school bus.

Due to limited traction, gravel had to be laid down for both a wrecker and a road grader to get the bus back onto the hill.

“We dumped two dump truck loads of sand and we still could not keep the wrecker from going down the hill,” Cason said. “We had to hook our grader up and help hold the wrecker.”

Once the vehicles had been recovered, road crews remained on scene and proceeded to grade the road all the way down to the asphalt. Once this was done, even more sand was laid down.

Neither vehicle sustained any major damages as a result of the slide outs.

Sunny Slopes Road/hill is maintained by the County Public Works Department and has always been one of the more difficult ones to take care of in the winter.

“Shoshone County has three hills we worry about — Dobson, Laude and Sunny Slopes. Two of those are bus routes,” Cason said.

When you combine extreme winter weather conditions with the steep grade of the hill, it’s not hard to predict what can happen.

“That snow that we were getting was light and fluffy,” Cason said. “It just turned everything into ice.”

Road crews had plowed and sanded Sunny Slopes Road twice that day before the incident occurred — once in the morning before school buses hit the road, and then again at 2 p.m.

Unfortunately, all Mother Nature needed was two hours to completely negate these efforts.

“That sand was just penetrating through the surface,” Cason said. “It would snow an inch on top of it and it would just disappear.”

Buses have not always braved the potentially dangerous conditions of Sunny Slopes Road.

The change happened 14 years ago when then-new WSD Superintendent Dr. Bob Ranells decided to seek assistance from the county on behalf of the safety of his students.

“There was a time when all of the students residing in the Sunny Slopes area would walk down that particular road to the bottom of the hill,” Ranells said. “We began working closely with the county and maintaining that road to allow us to go up there and pick up the kids in a much safer situation than having them walk down every morning and back up every night.”

The events of Tuesday haven’t changed Ranells’s or the district’s stance on that particular stretch of road either. In fact, it may have even added a new level of resolve to the position.

He also maintains that while the district and county will need to discuss the event to ensure that it hopefully never happens again, the WSD is still very happy to work alongside the county for the betterment of his students.

“It is imperative that we all continue to work together doing everything we can to maintain safe transportation throughout our valley,” Ranells said. “We are blessed to live in a winter wonderland and that we have four seasons to work through. In a perfect world, I suppose there would be a covering of that area and there wouldn’t be any snow or ice collecting on that hill, but that isn’t very realistic. So we will continue to work together collaboratively to provide a safe mode of transportation to and from school on that particular hill.”

Cason echoed Ranells’s statements and has already reached out to WSD so both the road crews and the buses are on the same page.

“We’re working with the bus barn and school district to kind of close that time in a little better, cause we to make sure that we don’t go out too early, but we don’t want to be late,” he said. “Around here, we can get a foot of snow in just a couple hours. With the kind of snow that was coming down that day, it was bad everywhere.”

With the crisis averted, Ranells was very complimentary of Bassemier, WSD Transportation Director Laith Mendy, and the community at large for their help during the situation.

“We are very happy with the way our transportation team addressed the issue of the bus incident yesterday evening,” Ranells said Wednesday. “Our bus communications system worked impeccably. It is always amazing to me how our people in the community pitch in to help when there is a need.”