Senior Citizens From Houston Die When Bus Catches Fire

By the time the flames were extinguished, the bus was a charred shell, the victims virtually destroyed.

"The majority of the bus melted. . . . In my 25 years here, I have never seen anything like this -- of this magnitude of victims -- short of an aircraft accident," Peritz said.

The National Transportation Safety Board, along with the Texas Department of Public Safety and Dallas County sheriff's office, is investigating. What sparked the initial fire is still unknown. The bus driver, employed by the charter bus company, Global Limo Inc., of Pharr, Tex., was being questioned by authorities. Officials were trying to determine who was on the bus that burned, because investigators had received only one manifest of residents' and staff members' names for the two buses that left Brighton Gardens.

Because of the intensive fire, the Dallas County medical examiner's office said some remains may have to be identified by matching DNA samples.

While authorities usually investigate the wreckage of such crashes at the scene, they moved the charred bus to a warehouse to free up the evacuation route.

Some of the Brighton Gardens residents were being evacuated -- and fleeing a hurricane -- for the second time in less than a month, said Sunrise spokesman Jamison Gosselin. But he said he did not know if any of the residents who had been evacuated from New Orleans in advance of Hurricane Katrina were on the chartered bus that caught fire Friday.

"We feel at this point that we did the best we could, and this was just a devastating and unfortunate tragedy that we never thought would have happened," Gosselin said.

Staff writer Bill Brubaker in Washington contributed to this report.