Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Miscellaneous Carrolton school bus crash Carrolton school bus crash The division of wealth is unevenly distributed throughout society’s so called social ladder. The “haves,” those who run corporations or have major influence on government decisions, control the majority of the wealth and resource available to achieve that wealth. Their major purpose it to build on that wealth no matter what the consequence may be. Those decisions sometimes negatively impact the lives of the “have nots,” people who, like us, have minimal if any influence on corporate spending and decisions. On May 14th, 1988 a group of children and adults from the First Assembly of God Church in Radcliff, Kentucky got aboard a Ford built 1977 Superior B-700 school bus and headed to King’s Island amusement park. King’s Island is located about 170 miles from Radcliff where the church is located. After spending the whole day at the amusement park, the group got on the bus and began traveling on Interstate seventy-one in northern Kentucky back to Radcliff. At about 10:45 P.M. while heading south on Interstate 71 just outside of Carrollton, Kentucky, the bus collided with a black pickup truck driven by Larry W. Mahoney. Mahoney was traveling north in the southbound lane at an extremely high amount of speed. The right front of the pickup truck hit the right front of the bus, breaking off the bus’s suspension and driving the leaf spring backward into the gas tank mounted outside the frame, just behind the front door. The spring speared the sixty-gallon tank, which had just been filled ten minutes earlier, punching a two and a half-inch hole in it. The gas tank caught fire and killed twenty-seven of the sixty-seven people on board. If the pickup had hit a few inches to the right, it would have been stopped by the bus’s frame rail instead of shearing trough sheet metal toward the fuel tank. In 1974 Congress passed school bus safety legislation, three years before the Carrollton school bus was built. Manufactures, like Ford Motor Company, managed to delay the implementation of automotive safety standards, including those relating to school-bus safety. In 1971, President of Ford Motor at the time, Lee Iacocca, was known to have lobbied President Richard Nixon to put off costly new rules for cars. He was quoted as saying, “Safety has really killed all of our business. He could have also been lobbying for the Ford Pinto, which was surrounded by much controversy due to the placement of its gas tank. The standard requiring that school bus gas tanks be protected against collisions finally went into force on April 1st, 1977. The Ford/Superior B-700 that was involved in the accident wasn’t completed until June 28th, 1977. But due to the fact that the chassis was completed on March 23rd it was completely all right. The National Transportation Safety Board urged that school bus fuel tanks be relocated away from the exit doors, and be better shielded. Five years later, Ford was still building buses with tanks unguarded, outside the frame rail, right beside the exit door. Six weeks after the crash, before a single lawsuit had been filed, Ford initiated settlement talks with a Radcliff law firm representing most of the victim’s families. The settlements reportedly promised $700,000 for each death, with payment on a sliding scale for the injured, as well as a $500,000 fund to help fight drunk driving (Kunen, 94). The families of sixty-four passengers quickly accepted. Although they decided to settle Ford never admitted responsibility. Larry and Janey Fair, who lost their twelve-year-old daughter in the crash, declined the settlement and filed suit in Carroll County Circuit Court. Their complaint against Ford Motor Company sought punitive damages, alleging that Ford had acted recklessly, willfully, and wantonly, consciously disregarding the danger they were creating, when they placed an unshielded fuel tank next to the front door of the bus (Kunen, 149). They settled one hundred fifty-nine million dollars, three percent of Ford’s 1988 profit. Karolyn and Jim Nunnallee were willing to settle but not with the $700,000. They instead wanted one dollar if Ford would agree to recall the 19,200 Ford-built, pre-1977-standard school buses the company estimated were still on the road, and either install a cage around the gas tanks or remount them inside the frame rails. Ford met with the Nunnalles three times but never came to a decision. This caused the Nunnalees to file suit the same day as the Fairs. The amount it would cost to recall all of the buses would surpass the offered settlement amount by two million dollars. Both families received one hundred fifty-nine million dollars. In 1989, after studying the Carrollton crash, the NTSB made recommendations to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. One was that the NHTSA should revise its fuel system integrity standard to provide additional protection for school buses in severe crashes. Ford Motor Company was the only company to oppose the measures, stating that it would cost more to protect the buses than to build them. Since 1993 manufactures were forced to protect the gas tank on school buses. That led to the development of a new style of school buses. These are the ones that look similar to transit buses with the front windows even with the bumper. Ford’s commitment to make nothing but money, led them to eventually lose the money they would probably have spent on build the buses right in the first place. This is a great example of how corporations ignore the safety of the general public in order to increase their profits. The problem with the social ladder is that the people at the bottom, the general public is definitely at risk at the expense of corporate greediness. Bibliography: Fortune magazine. www.fortune.com Kunen, James S. Reckless Disregard. New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1994. Kunen, James S. “Two Families Fight to Make Ford Pay For the Kentucky School-Bus Disaster That Killed Their Daughters.” 31 Oct., 1988: pgs. 91-94. Schmidt, William E. “Fiery Crash Kills 27 in Kentucky As Truck and Youths’ Bus Collide.” New York Times. 16 May, 1988: pg. A16 Word Count: 967
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