Authorities said the crash pinned the truck driver in the cab of his vehicle. It took more than 40 minutes to remove him because rescuers had to "unwrap [the crushed metal] from around him," said Arlington Fire Chief James Schwartz.
Scott said that before yesterday's crash, 15 accidents had occurred at the intersection since 2002, injuring five people, three of them pedestrians. He characterized it as a "moderate number of accidents for a controlled intersection."
In a letter sent home to parents yesterday, Hoffman-Boston Principal Yvonne Dangerfield wrote that a school staff member would ride the bus route with students this morning. Dangerfield also asked parents to limit the amount of television coverage their children watch over the next several days.
Arlington School Superintendent Robert G. Smith said grief counselors would be made available at Hoffman-Boston this week.
"Our hearts go out to the parents of the child who died and all the parents of the children who were injured," he said. Smith said it was the first fatal crash involving a county school bus in more than three decades.
Indeed, fatal school bus crashes are rare. Liz Neblett, a spokeswoman for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said school buses are "the safest transportation on the road." The fatality rate for school buses is 0.2 per 100 million miles traveled, more than seven times lower than for regular passenger vehicles. It is safer for parents to send their children on the bus than it is to drive them to school, Neblett noted.
The National Transportation Safety Board sent a team to the site to conduct an investigation into whether the vehicles were compliant with safety standards. The Virginia State Police sent a team of investigators to assist with accident reconstruction.
AAA & Rainbow Recycling and Trash Removal has a low rate of fatalities, mainly because its vehicles are large, easily seen by other motorists and generally traveling at low speeds, company officials said. According to records kept by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the company has not had a fatality or traffic accident in the past two years.
Those who witnessed yesterday's accident were not thinking about safety records.
Jenae Johnson, 28, said she heard the piercing squeal of brakes and whirled around to look out the third-story window of her apartment in the Dorchester Towers on Columbia Pike. Johnson dialed 911. As she waited for an operator, she watched as commuters jumped from their vehicles and flooded from their apartments to help the injured. Johnson recalled the heroism of one woman in particular, who ran from her car to help. "She kicked off her shoes, opened the back of the bus and started helping children out," Johnson said. "She was amazing."
After reporting the incident to a police dispatcher, Johnson joined in. She said she spent time holding the hand of an injured 11-year-old girl as rescuers worked to extricate her younger brother from the bus.
Two hours after the crash, Johnson was still sitting outside her apartment, watching as crash reconstruction experts examined the scene and fire officials prepared to remove Lilibeth from the bus.
"People would have responded if it were just any accident, but when they saw it was a school bus, they came running," Johnson said.
One of those was Willena Roney, who was on her way to the doctor's office on a Metrobus. The driver got out first, she said, and called for help. Seconds later, she and four other riders, including a teenager, followed the driver out the door.
