East Concord, N.Y. (WBEN) - Students from Springville-Griffith Institute in Southern Erie County are safe following a bus fire this morning on Middle Road in East Concord.
In a message posted on the district's website on Friday, Springville Schools Superintendent James Bialasik said one of the district's gas-powered buses caught fire Friday morning near Johnson and Middle Roads. Thanks to the quick actions of the students and bus driver on board, everyone was evacuated safely. No other vehicles were involved.
"Our bus driver took some really prompt and appropriate actions to make sure that all of our students were able to get off the bus safely and away from the bus before it caught fire," said Bialasik in an interview with WBEN.
A total of 15 middle and high school students were on the bus at the time of the incident, according to Bialasik. Another bus was quickly dispatched to the scene to ensure the students were out of the cold as quickly as possible.
"They were a little bit shaken up, a little bit nervous. I'm incredibly proud that when the Emergency Management Operations official from the Village of Springville, he was the first on the scene, and said the bus driver and the students were all together," Bialasik noted. "He had them relatively calm, so I think from that perspective, he did everything he needed to do to both keep the students safe and calm."
The students and driver were then cleared by EMS and allowed to report to their school buildings.
Bialasik says district buses are regularly subjected to a rigorous Department of Transportation inspection to ensure they are in good working order. The district says the cause of fire onboard the bus is currently unknown.
He adds Erie County Sheriff’s Investigators will be analyzing the bus to try to isolate the cause.
An incident like this is exactly why school bus safety is taken so seriously in school districts across the country.
"We have bus drills, coincidentally, coming up next week. We do these drills routinely throughout the year, and you do them in case something like this were to happen. So our students and bus driver responded exactly as we would expect them to," Bialasik said. "They were able to get off the bus quickly and away from it, and make sure that everybody maintained that level of safety. This is why we do the drills that we do. You can't always plan for everything, but you can make sure that you're as prepared as possible."
Middle Road was shut down between Van Slyke Road and Johnson Road on Friday while the firefighters tackled the blaze. It has since reopened.