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Problems plagued bus firm
Dallas company faced financial, safety troubles before Oklahoma crash



10:00 AM CST on Monday, February 27, 2006
By MICHAEL GRABELL / The Dallas Morning News


The investigation into a fatal rollover of a Dallas tour bus last weekend on an icy Oklahoma highway follows a well-beaten path for safety advocates.

A company with past safety problems. Two bankruptcies in four years. Passengers ejected from a bus with no seat belts.

"It doesn't surprise me at all," said Jerry Donaldson of the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. "It ties into a constant set of horrific motor coach crashes, which occur year after year."

Larry Warren, an attorney for Autobuses El Conejo Inc., the Dallas company whose bus crashed, declined to discuss the company's safety record.

Oklahoma troopers continue to look into what caused the Feb. 18 crash, which killed an 8-year-old boy traveling from Chicago and a woman traveling from Kansas City and injured dozens of others. But initial indications are that the driver lost control about 60 miles south of Oklahoma City because he was following too closely on slippery roads, said Lt. Stewart Meyer of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.

The driver of a car in front of the bus braked suddenly because he thought a car in the median was about to pull out, police said. The bus driver hit the brakes and skidded, causing the bus to roll over one and a quarter times onto its side.

Many of the 43 passengers fell out of their seats. The boy was thrown through a window and pinned under the bus. The driver was partially ejected through the windshield.

Miguel Esqueda, the 41-year-old bus driver from Fort Worth, has said that a car pulled in front of him; he doesn't believe that the crash was his fault.

"I saw more than eight accidents when I came on my way to Dallas," he said in an interview in Spanish. "I was driving very carefully, but when the weather is bad, that is the problem."

But Oklahoma transportation officials say dangerous road conditions on the day of the accident should have caused drivers on Interstate 35 to take extra precautions or stay off the road.

"When they left Oklahoma City, it had already been snowing here," said Terri Angier, spokeswoman for the Oklahoma Department of Transportation. "There was a good understanding of what the conditions were."

Mr. Warren, the attorney representing El Conejo, said in a statement that the company extends its prayers to the victims and their families. It has given passengers forms that allow them to submit up to $2,500 in medical bills to the company's insurance carrier. The form does not release El Conejo from liability, he said.


Safety violations

El Conejo, based in west Oak Cliff, was already on the radar of safety investigators.

Records show that the company faced a federal safety audit less than two weeks before the crash after regulators had found enough serious violations to give it a "conditional" rating in December.

"Conditional" is not the worst rating, but it means that a company doesn't have "adequate safety management controls in place to ensure compliance," according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Web site.

"It was about having procedures in place, doing background checks, having documentation on file," said Ian Grossman, an agency spokesman. "They were a new [company], and here they were less than a year later probably not having all the operating procedures in order."

The follow-up audit on Feb. 6 found that the company had improved, and it was upgraded to "satisfactory."

Mr. Grossman did not say what specific violations were found in the December review, but records show that driver safety at El Conejo was a concern for regulators.

From August until December, the company was listed as "deficient" in driver safety, meaning its safety record was in the bottom quarter of all federally regulated bus and truck companies.


More concerns

One violation cited in roadside inspections was using drivers who couldn't speak English. Two El Conejo drivers have been ordered off the road by bus inspectors since May for this reason.

Federal regulations say that drivers must be able to speak English well enough to understand traffic signs, converse with the public and respond to official inquiries.

It's unclear whether Mr. Esqueda violated the rule. He spoke in Spanish and used an interpreter when he addressed the media about the accident. A woman who answered his home phone said he spoke a little English but not too much.

Mr. Esqueda, who has had a Texas commercial driver's license since 1993, does not have any restrictions on his license as a result of his language ability. And investigators say he was able to answer some questions.

Lt. Meyer said the man was able to provide basic information in English. "If he got into something more complicated, more than likely he wouldn't be able to," Lt. Meyer said.

Mr. Esqueda's driving record shows that he hasn't had any accidents or tickets in at least three years, the period immediately available in state records.

In 1991, El Conejo Bus Lines became one of the first companies in Dallas to cater to the growing market of customers wanting to go to and from the Mexican border. With terminals in major cities across the country, it was able to compete with similar companies that are subsidiaries of Greyhound Lines, according to newspaper accounts.

The owner at the time joked to the Dallas Business Journal that he named the company "El Conejo" – which means "the rabbit" in Spanish – because it's what the greyhounds always chase at the dog track.

But after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, El Conejo went downhill financially. It filed for bankruptcy in 2002 with $10 million in liabilities. It reorganized and shrunk its fleet from 61 buses to 31, according to bankruptcy records.

The company continued to struggle and, blaming high gas prices, filed for bankruptcy again in December 2004. El Conejo Bus Lines sold its assets to Autobuses El Conejo, a new company that is indirectly related to the old company but has different owners, bankruptcy records show.

While aviation officials increase scrutiny of safety and maintenance issues even before an airline files for bankruptcy, bus regulators do not collect financial information or consider it in a company's safety record.

Like nearly all tour buses, the 1998 Dina Viaggio involved in the accident was not equipped with seat belts. The two people who died were ejected from the bus when it overturned.


The seat belt question

Whether seat belts should be installed on buses has been the subject of debate for decades.

"Many of the eight or so [National Transportation Safety Board] investigations of catastrophic motor coach crashes that have occurred since 1999 involved occupant ejection," Mr. Donaldson said. "If any bus rolls over, the chances of ejection are pretty high."

Federal regulations do not require buses to have seat belts. Bus industry officials say that the seating design of buses, known as "compartmentalization," usually protects passengers from serious injuries and that belts might cause even more harm.

A Waco jury recently ruled that a bus was unreasonably unsafe because it didn't have any safety belts. The jury ordered the bus manufacturer to pay $17.5 million to the survivors and families of victims of a 2003 bus crash, which killed seven passengers, many of whom were thrown from the bus.

Jose Gonzalez, an Oklahoma City attorney who represents 34 victims of the Feb. 18 crash, said he plans to use the verdict in a lawsuit he expects to file today.

"Even in airplanes we have seat belts," he said. "In today's day and age, you'd figure that somebody would care enough to say, 'Put some seat belts in.' "

Al Día reporter Patricia Estrada contributed to this report.

E-mail mgrabell@dallasnews.com