On August 12, 2008, the federal government froze all approvals for new bus companies after a fatal crash in Texas on August 8, 2008 exposed a flaw in regulations that allows banned companies to come back under new names.
The head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, John H. Hill, said that the freeze would stay in place until his agency could find a way to detect when companies banned from interstate travel return to the road under a corporate alias without fixing their problems.
“I’m not granting any authority to any passenger carriers until I get my hands around this,” he said, promising an effort to match addresses, fax numbers and other details. The agency ordinarily approves about 100 carriers a month.
Federal officials said the bus that crashed early Friday morning near Sherman, Texas, killing 17 people, belonged to a man who was operating charter buses under two corporate names. The bus operator, Angel de la Torre, created a fresh company, Iguala Busmex, after federal investigators had shut down his previous bus company, Angel Tours, two months earlier for safety violations, investigators said.
The bus hit a guardrail and careened off a bridge after a retreaded tire on the front axle blew out and the driver lost control. Retreaded tires cannot legally be put on front wheels, investigators said. The driver also had a checkered history, having been stopped for drunken driving and speeding.
Mr. Hill acknowledged that enforcement of bans by his agency is spotty. The federal government relies on state police to stop buses randomly and pull them from the road if federal regulators have ordered them taken out of service. But some bus operators take the chance they will not be stopped and succeed.
Perhaps worse, Mr. Hill said that his authority extends only to interstate operations, but that many states have no mechanism for applying the federal findings to buses that operate within their borders.
Mr. Hill, who was a member of the Indiana State Police for 19 years before he became head of the federal agency two years ago, gave an example, saying that if the federal government had banned an Indiana bus company from interstate operations, the state of Indiana had no mechanism for shutting down the company’s in-state operation.
The United States Transportation Department has nationwide responsibility for hazardous materials transport and for commercial drivers licenses. But for all other operations that do not cross state lines, Mr. Hill said, “it’s a state issue.” He added he was not sure how many states are like Indiana.
In the latest crash, Texas authorities were never told that Mr. de la Torre’s first bus company had been banned, said Tom Vinger, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety. “Occasionally, we are notified when an interstate carrier is put out of service, but to the best our knowledge we were not notified in this case,” he said.
Mr. Vinger added that under Texas law the bus should not have been operating anywhere in Texas once the federal government suspended the company. But the state did not find out about the suspension until after the accident, he said.
One issue in the investigation is which entity had control of the bus that crashed. The exact status of the bus that crashed is in dispute. Mr. de la Torre operated a company called Angel Tours Inc., and, according to Federal officials, later operated one called Iguala Busmex Inc. (Iguala is a town in the mountains north of Acapulco, Mexico.) Mr. Hill said Mr. de la Torre was denying any connection to Iguala Busmex.
Investigators have still not interviewed Mr. de la Torre, Mr. Hill said. “His attorney is keeping him pretty well away from us,” he said.
On August 12, 2008, no one answered the telephone at the two companies’ shared headquarters on Telephone Road in Houston.
At the American Bus Association, the trade association of the motor coach industry, Peter J. Pantuso, a spokesman, said the Texas crash showed several weaknesses. “That accident, as unfortunate and tragic as it was, shows a lack of federal and state enforcement,” he said.
Companies barred by Washington from interstate commerce should not be allowed to operate inside state boundaries, he said, and if Mr. Hill did not know what the practice of the states was, “that’s a problem by itself. He is the chief federal enforcement officer for commercial vehicles.”
If a company is told to shut down, Mr. Pantuso said, “whether it’s pulling the plates or impounding those vehicles, there has to be something of such magnitude that we know no one is going to be getting on a bus operated by those individuals.”
There are about 3,500 active bus companies, he said, running about 35,000 buses, which means that most of them are quite small.
Mr. Pantuso said that there were many legitimate reasons why a bus company might want to open a new operation for example, because it was diversifying into a new area, for example and that a freeze was not the right approach.
The aftermath of the Texas crash has been a clash of authorities. Mr. Hill’s investigators went to the headquarters of the two companies in the Texas crash and were “thrown out of the premises by the owner and his attorney,” he said. The transportation department’s inspector general, who has subpoena powers, later gained access, Mr. Hill said. Investigators are documenting interstate trips after the company was banned from making them; each can carry an $11,000 fine, and other criminal penalties, he said.
But generally speaking, companies that are banned but continue to operate will be noticed only if a driver is stopped for breaking a traffic rule or through some other spot-check, he said.
