During the early morning hours of July 22, 2010, a Greyhound bus traveling to Sacramento from Los Angeles crashed on a highway in California’s Central Valley, killing six and seriously injuring nine others, according to a recent Associated Press news report.

The bus, carrying 36 people, struck an SUV that had overturned in front of it, slammed into a concrete center divider and clipped another vehicle shortly after 2 a.m. just outside downtown Fresno, California Highway Patrol Officer Axel Reyes said. It went off the right shoulder of the highway down a 15-foot embankment, hit a eucalyptus tree and came to rest on a freeway off-ramp with its front end smashed and tree branches jutting into the vehicle.

Twisted pieces of metal, broken glass and torn clothing littered the ground around the bus wreckage.

Arlen Snider, who had been traveling from Phoenix to Sacramento to visit his mother, said he was asleep in the middle section of the bus when the crash occurred. He awoke to the smell of smoke and injured passengers all around him.

“I woke up on the floor of the bus and started helping people off the bus,” Snider, who escaped uninjured, said after arriving in Sacramento’s bus terminal Thursday morning.

The six dead included four women and two men. Nine people were taken to the hospital with moderate to critical injuries, Reyes said. The bus driver was among the dead.

“I had just woke up and I heard a boom once, and a boom again and the next thing I know we were down this embankment,” Linda Gee, a passenger on the bus, told KMPH-TV in Fresno.

The blue Chevy Trailblazer that had overturned in the fast lane also landed at the bottom of the embankment, its roof caved in and doors crushed.

Officials were investigating the cause of the initial SUV crash, including whether it was related to drunken driving, Reyes said.

The bus departed Los Angeles late Wednesday and stopped in Fresno before continuing on its route to Sacramento with 35 passengers on board, said Greyhound spokeswoman Bonnie Bastian. It was on its way to Madera for one of about eight scheduled stops when the crash occurred.

A relief bus was sent to take nine passengers who wanted to continue on to their destinations.

The two northbound lanes of Highway 99, a major route through the San Joaquin Valley, were closed for several hours after the crash.

Disney spokeswoman Andrea Finger said the bus driver and witnesses are currently waiting to be interviewed by authorities. Florida Highway Patrol Sgt. Kim Montes said 28 passengers were inside the Disney bus. None of the passengers was injured in the crash.

Troopers are conducting a traffic homicide investigation, Montes said. The boy and his family are Florida residents, but they are not from Orlando.

This is the second fatality involving Disney’s transportation network within the last year. Last summer, a 21-year-old monorail driver died when another train backed into his monorail during a botched track switch.

The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration ultimately fined Disney $35,200 for workplace-safety violations discovered during a review of that accident. The National Transportation Safety Board is expected to release the results of its own investigation into the crash later this year.

Today’s fatality comes during one of the theme park’s busiest weeks of the year. Many schools across the country are out for spring break vacation and, with the Easter holiday weekend approaching, Disney parks are a popular destination.

The Magic Kingdom, the biggest theme park in the world, has neared capacity at several points this the week.

Disney’s Fort Wilderness Resort is a wooded campground near the Magic Kingdom theme park. The facility includes about 800 campsites and 400 cabins. It is the only camping and RV accommodation at Disney World.

The campground, like Disney’s hotels, is served by a fleet of company buses that transport guests to the resort’s theme parks, water parks and Downtown Disney shopping-and-dining district.

Today’s fatal accident is the third bus-related incident at Disney in six months. Last week, one bus rear-ended a second bus near Epcot, sending eight people to area hospitals. Seven injuries were minor and one was serious, officials said. The crash happened when one bus stopped to merge as World Drive narrowed from three to two lanes. The second bus did not stop in time and struck the stopped bus.

In July, two Walt Disney World buses crashed in front of the Contemporary Resort. The crash sent 12 people to four hospitals with minor injuries.

On March 6, 2010, U.S. District Judge George King of the Central District of California in Los Angeles issued the order against Tierra Santa Inc. and its owner, Cayetano Martinez. Martinez earlier signed a consent decree prohibiting him or any affiliated company from hauling passengers without U.S. Department of Transportation authority, which is required to take passengers from one state to another.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration demanded Van Nuys, Calififornia based Tierra Santa stop operating on March 5, 2010, the day of the crash south of Phoenix. The judge’s order makes the shutdown enforceable by the court.

“They knew they were running illegally,” Duane DeBruyne, a Department of Transportation spokesman in Washington, D.C., said.

A federal complaint to be filed against the company today says the motor carrier administration previously shut down Martinez, who then attempted “to reincarnate himself as a new carrier” that unsuccessfully sought Department of Transportation operating authority, the department said in a news release Sunday.

“Martinez has shown a persistency and determination to continue operating under new entities and businesses,” the release quotes the complaint as saying.

The bus that crashed entered the United States from Mexico at El Paso, Texas. It was headed to Phoenix to change drivers when it hit a pickup truck, veered onto the left shoulder of the road and rolled on Interstate 10 on the Gila River Indian Reservation. The impact crushed the roof and knocked out the windows.

More than a dozen passengers remained hospitalized over the weekend.

Tierra Santa applied last April for operating authority to haul passengers across state lines. The Department of Transportation notified the company by registered mail that it could not conduct interstate transportation during the review, DeBruyne said.

The agency sought more information for the application but the company never responded. In December, the department sent another certified letter telling the company it had run out of time and was not authorized to take passengers across state lines, DeBruyne said.

The consent decree does not prevent civil penalties against Martinez for possible violations of motor carrier safety regulations, transportation officials said.

The bus with 32 people aboard had just visited murals in Lake Placid, Florida and was headed back to a nearby hotel when the accident took place. A car turning onto the highway failed to yield and struck the side of the bus, a Florida Highway Patrol crash report said. The bus ran off the road and rolled over at least twice, ejecting several passengers.

The patrol said two died at the scene, while three had critical injuries. The rest of the injuries ranged from serious to minor, and all but one of the people on the bus were taken to local hospitals. The driver of the car wasn’t injured.

The passengers, who ranged in age from 66 to 87, had traveled to the area from around the United Sates to participate in an educational program affiliated with South Florida Community College in Avon Park.

“We want the drivers of big rigs and buses and those who share the roads with them to be safe,” LaHood said. “This is an important safety step and we will be taking more to eliminate the threat of distracted driving.”

The new ban carries fines of up to $2,750.

Research by trucking regulators show that drivers take their eyes off the road for much of the time that they send and receive text messages, and they are significantly more at risk of getting into an accident than someone who is not texting.

The National Safety Council, a research and advocacy group estimates that 200,000 crashes of all types on U.S. roads are caused by drivers who are texting. Nearly two dozen U.S. states ban “texting” while driving for all motor vehicles and others are considering similar action.

Four students, ranging in ages from 5 to 13, were on the bus at the time, police said. Two were transported to Connecticut Children’s Medical Center with minor injuries, police tell the Courant.  The other two children were also brought to the hospital but did not suffer any injuries. The bus was on its way to Renbrook School.

The driver of the car hit by the school bus was taken to Hartford Hospital where he was treated for possible trauma and released, according to the Courant.

Police said the school bus went through a red light and collided with a car at the corner of Mountain Road and Boulevard at 7:05 a.m.  The car went under the bus, where it was stopped by the bus’ axle, police tell the Courant.

The co-chairman of the legislature’s transportation committee acknowledged that the pros and cons of such a mandate must still be researched, but he said that proposing legislation will jump-start that process.

Vikas Parikh a junior who attended the Greater Hartford Academy of Math and Science and Rocky Hill High School, was heading to a robotics competition in Farmington with his classmates on a school bus when it and a Volvo station wagon collided about 8 a.m. Parikh, 16, was the only person to die in the crash. Other bus passengers suffered broken bones and bruises.

The bus plummeted down a 20-foot drop-off alongside I-84 near the Hartford- West Hartford line. State police said that the Volvo was driven by Christopher Toppi, 16, of Glastonbury, who was not injured.

At public hearings in 1997 and 2006, the Connecticut School Transportation Association testified against requiring seat belts on school buses. The group said that buses were already safe, that lap belts could cause injuries and that it would be hard to monitor seat belt use. The association also said that seat belt installation would be costly and that adding seat belts would be the least effective way to improve school bus safety.

Although the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sets national standards for school bus safety, state governments and local school districts have the authority to require seat belts on buses.

A Dec. 1, 2009, report by the state Office of Legislative Research, referring to a national report, said that six states; California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York and Texas require seat belts on school buses, although the Louisiana and Texas laws won’t take effect until those states can fund them. California requires, and Texas would require, new school buses to have lap/shoulder, or three-point safety belts, rather than lap belts.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration does not require seat belts on large school buses, such as the one Parikh was in, but it does require seat belts on smaller buses; those that have a total weight of less than 10,000 pounds.

Larger school buses make up 80% of the nation’s fleet of 482,000 school buses, according to the Connecticut Office of Legislative Research.

When the safety agency established school bus regulations in 1976, it considered requiring seat belts in large buses but decided to rely on the use of high-backed, flexible seats designed to absorb passenger impact in close spaces.

Last spring, the safety administration updated its regulations to require all school buses manufactured after Oct. 21, 2011, to have 24-inch seat backs; up from the current 20 inches to better protect students in a crash.

The National Transportation Safety Board found that a retreaded tire on the vehicle’s right front axle became underinflated as a result of being punctured. Federal regulations prohibit retreads from being affixed to the front of buses, but the board found that the retread itself wasn’t at fault. The agency said that bus drivers should check pressure and that new buses should be equipped with tire-pressure monitoring devices.

But the NTSB also took federal and state agencies to task in the findings adopted by the three-member panel after a hearing from investigators at a meeting in Washington. Investigators outlined a series of missteps that allowed the bus to be on the road.

In detailing the events leading up to the crash, investigators described how the Houston-based charter operator, Iguala BusMex, had yet to receive the authority to operate outside Texas. The company was related to another, Angel Tours that had been shut down for violating federal safety standards.

The board’s chair, Deborah A.P. Hersman, said the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees buses and trucks, is still lagging in its ability to detect so-called “rogue” operators. “They wanted to get this carrier out of service,” she said. “They just weren’t able to tighten the sieve enough to do it.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is responsible for vehicle inspections in the state, also was criticized. The bus involved in the crash had passed an inspection eight days before the accident at a Houston business, Five Minute Inspections, despite a series of deficiencies, including the retread on the front axle, the NTSB said.

NTSB investigator Chris Voeglie told the board that it appears that the DPS isn’t providing sufficient oversight of inspection facilities and that greater federal authority may be needed. The board suggested that FMCSA impose stricter standards on states that allow private companies to conduct bus inspections. “Our concern is this shop is certified by the state and didn’t have adequate equipment to conduct the investigation,” he said.

A DPS spokeswoman, Tela Mange, said she couldn’t comment on the board meeting because she wasn’t aware the hearing was taking place.

The board’s recommendations are not binding, and would have to be adopted by the appropriate agencies or in some cases, Congress, to take effect. The board also found that the failure of the bridge’s railing and a lack of seatbelts contributed to the wreck and its casualties. It also said a bus luggage rack impeded passengers from leaving the vehicle when it fell and hindered rescue efforts.

Two students were rushed by helicopter to the Portneuf Regional Medical Center in Pocatello. An additional 12 students went by ambulance with serious injuries, and 30 were taken to the Pocatello hospital by bus with minor injuries.

Police on October 11, 2009 released the name of the bus driver, who remained hospitalized in stable condition. Police said blood and urine samples were taken, as is customary in fatal accidents. The result will likely take weeks. “We’re trying to figure out why the bus went off the road,” said Capt. Eric Dayley of the Idaho State Police in Pocatello.

54 students were on the bus that crashed. A total of 222 students were on the trip, divided into four buses.

The woman, Curtrice E. Gravitt, 33, was killed when the bus rolled onto its side, trapping her underneath, the State Police said in a statement. Ms. Gravitt, who last lived in Manhattan, according to public records, suffered severe head, neck and chest injuries and was pronounced dead at the scene, the State Police said.

Ray Agnew, a hospital spokesman, said two of the injured passengers had surgery and their conditions were not immediately available, while a third was in serious condition in the intensive-care unit. By the afternoon of July 5, 2009, four of the passengers had been treated and released, the police said. The bus driver was also treated for minor injuries, the police said.

New York State Police said the bus was operated by Angelic Tours and Shuttles Inc., a private carrier based in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and had been taking passengers to visit New York State prisons in Ray Brook and Malone. Messages left at the bus company’s offices in Fayetteville and New York City were not returned.

The Northway is a portion of I-87, which runs more than 330 miles from the Bronx to the Canadian border. In August 2006, the driver of a Greyhound bus and four of its passengers traveling from New York to Montreal died when the bus flipped over on I-87, south of Plattsburgh, after the left front tire either blew out or deflated abruptly, causing the driver to lose control, the police said.

On July 5, 2009, Joseph J. DuPrey, chief of the Queensbury Central Fire Department, said the department went to the scene, about a quarter-mile south of Exit 21, with equipment to extricate the victims. “When we arrived on the scene, the bus was laying on its side on the median side,” he said in a telephone interview. A long skid mark on the highway indicated that the bus, which had been traveling north, slid for some distance before coming to a stop, Chief DuPrey said.

The woman who was killed had been seated near the back of the bus, but it was not clear how she became trapped under the bus. “How she actually got there I could not begin to even fathom,” Chief DuPrey said. “Whether it was through a window that got broken out during the bus rolling on its side, I can’t begin to take a guess.”

Another passenger, whose lower legs were trapped under the bus, had to be extricated with an air bag, he said.