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The Bluffton University bus crash was an automobile crash which occurred during the early morning hours of March 2, 2007, on Interstate 75 in Atlanta, Georgia. A chartered motorcoach was carrying 33 members of the Bluffton University baseball team from Bluffton, Ohio on their way to a tournament game during spring break in Sarasota, Florida. The group planned to travel without an overnight stop on the approximately 900-mile, 18-hour trip. The trip went without incident from Bluffton south to a motel in Adairsville, Georgia, located 54 miles north of Atlanta, which was near the half-way point. There, a relief driver, who had been positioned earlier in order to have the required sleep period, took over and began operating the second half of the trip to Florida. About 5:38 am EST, operating the motorcoach southbound in a left-hand HOV lane of I-75 in the Atlanta metropolitan area, the driver apparently mistakenly entered a left HOV-only exit ramp from the HOV lane, which led upward to a wide elevated road and a T-junction marked by a stop sign. The bus was traveling at highway speed, when it reached the top of the ramp and the stop sign. As the driver of the motorcoach failed to successfully stop or turn, and lost control, the bus slid sideways into a concrete bridge wall and chain-link security fence and fell 19 feet, landing on its left side across the Interstate highway below. Within minutes, multiple emergency services from the Atlanta area were on the scene. The 29 passengers who originally survived the crash were taken to Atlanta-area hospitals. Seven motorcoach occupants were killed: the driver, his wife, and five passengers. Seven other passengers received serious injuries, and 21 passengers received minor injuries. The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) dispatched a team to the scene and began an investigation. Local and state police and officials of the Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) also investigated. In its final report, the NTSB determined that the probable cause was "the motorcoach driver's mistaking the HOV-only left exit ramp to Northside Drive for the southbound Interstate 75 HOV through lane." A contributing factor to the crash was "failure of the Georgia Department of Transportation to install adequate traffic control devices to identify the separation and divergence of the Northside Drive HOV-only left exit ramp from the southbound Interstate 75 HOV through lane." The NTSB further determined that contributing to the severity of the crash was "the motorcoach's lack of an adequate occupant protection system." ==Details== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Bluffton University bus crash」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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