No Serious Injuries in Wild String of Collisions

Seven vehicles, including a school bus, collided Thursday in a bizarre chain-reaction accident that also involved two high school students and a jogger, but no one was seriously injured, authorities said.

“The possibility for [the accident] having a tragic ending was there,” said Carolyn Burch, principal of Francis Polytechnic High School, which two of the victims attend.

The accident occurred about 8 a.m. at Whitsett Avenue and Roscoe Boulevard when a small school bus carrying six special education students slowed to stop for a student and was sideswiped by a Los Angeles Department of Water and Power pickup truck attempting to drive around it, said Officer Jordan Van Meter of the California Highway Patrol.

Another truck, displaying a UCLA seal on its door and carrying a 4-foot-wide tree stump, rear-ended the DWP truck, causing it to spin around and come to a stop facing the bus.

The UCLA truck rolled through the intersection and hit a Toyota truck that was waiting to make a left turn from Roscoe to Whitsett. The Toyota spun around and hit a Firebird, which careened into an Oldsmobile behind it. The Toyota also hit a 19-year-old woman jogger in the crosswalk.

The UCLA truck rolled on and hit a 16-year-old girl and 12-year-old boy who were standing at a nearby bus bench. The truck ran over the girl and dragged her a few feet before striking a chain-link fence and smashing the front end of an Econoline van in the parking lot of the high school.

The truck’s size worked to the girl’s advantage, allowing it to pass over her without crushing her.

“She was very, very lucky,” Van Meter said.

The two young people are students at the school, and the van belonged to a parent who was attending a conference there.

As many as 20 people may have been involved in the accident, including drivers and passengers, authorities said. Their names were withheld pending completion of the preliminary investigation.

Wreckage from the collision was scattered over a quarter-mile stretch of Roscoe, and the intersection was closed for several hours.

Van Meter said it was miraculous that there were only moderate injuries.

Firefighters extricated two men from the DWP truck with a mechanical device, authorities said.

The children on the bus were going to Lowman Special Education Center in North Hollywood. Ranging in age from 4 to 19, they were examined at the scene by paramedics and a doctor from the center.

An aide aboard the bus was taken to a nearby hospital, and the children continued their trip on another bus.

The two Poly students were treated and released, Burch said. They had missed the regular school bus that morning and were taking public transportation, she told school officials.

No arrests were made, and the cause of the accident is under investigation, Van Meter said.

“We know the sequence of events, but we don’t know what caused it,” he said.