Safety Board Calls for Tougher Standards for Bus Drivers’ Medical Exams

Bus and truck drivers should be required to undergo more stringent physical examinations, federal officials said Tuesday, linking recent crashes to drivers with heart problems, kidney disease and poorly controlled diabetes.

In its final report on the Mother’s Day 1999 bus crash that killed 22 people in New Orleans, the National Transportation Safety Board said the federal government should make sure that doctors who perform the examinations know the demands of driving a truck or bus, learn how health problems can affect a driver’s performance and be able to find out if an applicant failed an earlier exam. The exams are given once every two years.

In addition, the board said, doctors and others who have concerns about a driver’s health should be able to tell state and federal transportation officials without the risk of being sued.

Despite being hospitalized 10 times in the 20 months before the accident, for heart and kidney disease, the driver in the New Orleans crash was repeatedly cleared to renew his commercial license and doctors never reported his health problems to state or federal officials. Three months after the crash, the driver, Frank Bedell, died of a heart attack.

Bedell also had been fired from two previous jobs after failing drug tests, but his last employer had no way to find that information out. After the crash, Bedell tested positive for marijuana.

The NTSB blamed the crash on the driver’s poor health and the failure of the doctors to try to take him off the road.

The board also recommended setting up a system to allow a prospective employer to find out whether an applicant has failed a drug test and renewed its suggestions for bus design standards that would protect occupants more effectively in crashes.

The New Orleans crash was one of several accidents in the last two years involving bus or truck drivers with medical problems. In May, a driver returning from a Mississippi casino drove his bus off an Interstate 10 ramp, injuring 27 people. The driver, who had diabetes, was in hypoglycemic shock when taken to a hospital.

“Medical personnel need to report unfit drivers to the proper authorities,” said acting NTSB chairwoman Carol Carmody. “It’s a systemic problem. No evaluation was passed through to anyone who could do something about it.”

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees the bus and truck industry, plans to review the NTSB recommendations, spokesman Dave Longo said. And Michele Janis, a vice president of the American Bus Assn., an industry group, endorsed the proposals.

“This is about highway safety,” Janis said. “It’s making sure that anyone unfit to be behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle is kept out of that seat.”

Other recent bus crashes have NTSB officials looking for other safety loopholes they need to close. Some examples:

* Earlier this month, a driver apparently fell asleep before losing control of his bus, which flipped over after hitting a highway median on Interstate 24 in Tennessee. The crash killed one person and injured 45. That same week, a driver was charged with careless driving after his bus returning from Atlantic City along the Garden State Parkway flipped over. Twenty-three people were hurt.

* The month before, a Greyhound driver fell asleep before his bus veered off Interstate 15 northeast of Las Vegas, injuring 37 people. The driver later died of his injuries.

* In June, a bus hit a car and a pickup along an expressway leading to Atlantic City, killing two people and injuring dozens. State police were investigating reports that the car was racing another vehicle before the crash.