The driver of a school bus that rolled into a ditch Monday is fully responsible for the accident, authorities in Fengxian county, Jiangsu Province said yesterday, as the death toll for the crash rose to 15.
"Our preliminary findings showed that the driver, 30-year-old Hong Xu, does not hold an appropriate license to drive the bus. It had earlier been suspended for a lack of registration," Chen Likun, deputy head of the county public security bureau, told reporters.
According to Chen, school buses in the county are all run by individuals, who sign agreements with parents to carry students, and schools are responsible for supervising their operation.
Zhang Bin, a deputy head of the county government, told reporters that 29 students were onboard the bus when it veered into the 60-centimeter-deep ditch.
"Hong tried to dodge an oncoming pedicab but lost control of the bus. Some students were trapped at the bottom of the overturned bus and drowned as water gushed in," Zhang said.
"Six students managed to escape. Twenty-three others were rushed to two hospitals. Fifteen of them have died," Zhang said, adding the bus was designed to carry 52 people and was not overloaded.
"All school buses in the county will not run until local authorities conduct a thorough safety check," Zhang Jinghua, the mayor of the city of Xuzhou, announced yesterday.
The Ministry of Education (MOE) also ordered middle and primary schools as well as kindergartens nationwide to check the safety condition of school buses.
A man surnamed Chi, whose 7-year-old nephew died in the accident, told the Global Times that all the victims, aged between 7 and 12, were students at Shouxian Central Primary School.
"About three kilometers away from the last stop, the driver chose a narrow path he had never taken before as a shortcut, which was when the tragedy happened," Chi said.
Liu Shubin, who lost his 12-year-old niece, told the Global Times that the bus was the school's only vehicle and always overloaded with more than 70 students.
Monday's deadly accident came less than a month after 19 preschoolers were killed November 16 when a coal truck slammed into their overcrowded school van in Gansu Province.
This sparked a nationwide outcry over the poor safety of school buses.
Also on Monday, a school bus carrying 59 pupils was hit by a heavy-duty truck in the city of Foshan, Guangdong Province, with 37 students injured.
Two students were killed in another school bus accident in Zhumadian, Henan Province yesterday, with 20 others injured.
Premier Wen Jiabao urged the government to quickly create safety regulations and standards for school buses and to further improve their design, production, and distribution.
On Sunday, the State Council published a draft guideline aimed at establishing safety standards for school buses.
The draft demands local governments, schools and bus drivers strictly obey safety regulations, including safety checks every six months. It adds that school buses should be given right-of-way and cannot run at speeds over 60 kilometers per hour.
However, the draft did not specify how much the government will spend on the buses, which has become a touchy issue for schools and parents in underdeveloped rural areas, the Xinhua News Agency commented.
Last year, a legislator's proposal to the National People's Congress for safer school buses was rejected.
The MOE said the proposal would cost 450 billion yuan ($70.69 billion) a year - about one-third of the country's annual spending on education, which was deemed "far too large."
Professor Yuan Guilin from Beijing Normal University told Xinhua the government should actively work to raise funds from other sources and create policy support to ensure the smooth and safe operation of school buses.
Recent school bus accidents have also risen due to the closure and merging of village schools in rural areas, as the MOE tries to "improve the overall quality of schools" and "to allocate resources in a more rational way."
The trend follows the drop of the birth rate and the rapid urbanization drive, which have seen many rural children follow their parents to cities.
Of all school bus accidents reported in the last five years, 74 percent of the victims were rural students in underdeveloped central and western regions, Xinhua reported.
"In some remote areas like Guizhou and Yunnan provinces, schools are always two to three hours walk away," Gao Lin, with the NGO Zigen China for Rural Education and Development, told the Global Times.
"Many students cannot afford to take school buses every day and have to take a ride on small three-wheeled vans designed for carrying goods and food, which are very dangerous even if they are not overloaded," Gao said.
