Right-Front Hit, Jammed Door, Thin Smoke
14:20, dry and sunny, four-lane city street. A car runs the red and strikes your bus's right front corner at about 30 mph; you were rolling through the green at roughly 15 mph. You have 34 passengers. The impact jams the front door, shatters right-side glass, and leaves the engine running. From the right front wheel well you see a thin plume of gray smoke and smell hot rubber and fluid. One passenger is holding her wrist; another is bleeding from a forehead cut after hitting a stanchion. The car's driver is slumped over the wheel and not moving. Traffic is squeezing past on your left.
1. Walk through your first sixty seconds.
Read the worked answer
Stop the machine and stop the hazard source: park brake set, transmission in park, engine off, battery/master switch off if equipped, hazards on. An engine running with smoke in a wheel well is a fire waiting for a fuel line.
Call it in: 911 with the intersection, "bus with 34 passengers, multiple injuries, one trapped in a passenger car, smoke from the bus." Then dispatch. One call, not five.
Read the smoke. Thin gray smoke plus hot rubber/fluid smell from a wheel well is a fire indicator, not a cosmetic one. Default to evacuation rather than waiting to see if it grows.
Evacuate: front door is jammed - rear door first, emergency windows if the rear is blocked. Move them away from the bus, upwind, and out of the traffic lane, onto the sidewalk or a parking lot, not into the next lane. Then do a head count against your known load of 34, and have them stay put - passengers who wander back for their bags are the second emergency.
2. Two passengers are hurt and the car driver is unresponsive. What do you do - and what do you not do?
Read the worked answer
Do: keep breathing and bleeding as the priorities. Wrist injury - support it, keep her seated and calm, don't manipulate it to "test" it. Forehead laceration - direct pressure with a clean dressing, gloves if you have them. Keep both of them out of traffic and out of the sun; note what time it happened.
The car driver: leave him in the car unless there is fire or another immediate danger. An unresponsive driver with an obvious mechanism for spinal injury should not be extracted by a bus driver. Check that he is breathing, keep his airway open if you can do it without moving his neck, and tell 911 exactly what you see. If the smoke spreads to the car, that changes it - then you move him, carefully, and say so.
Don't: don't move the bus to clear the lane with smoke in the wheel well; don't hand out diagnoses; don't let bystanders drag the car driver out; don't put an injured passenger back on a bus that may be on fire.
3. Police are on scene, the smoke has stopped, and a reporter and the car's insurance adjuster both want a statement. What are your obligations now?
Read the worked answer
Say nothing about fault. Not to the other driver, not to the adjuster, not to a reporter, not in a group text. Facts that feel obvious at 14:20 - the light color, the speed - are exactly what gets litigated, and your memory will be tested months later. Give your name, your company, and your position; refer everything else to the company.
Do:
- Stay on scene until released; you are the driver of record for the 34 people who were in your care.
- Give the officer your license, your CDL, and the facts you observed - to the officer, in an official statement.
- Get passenger names and contact information while they are still there; that list is impossible to rebuild afterwards.
- Give a complete report to your company: pre-trip result that morning, hours, speed, what you saw, what you did, the time of every step.
- Be available for post-crash alcohol and drug testing. A CDL driver involved in a crash with injury requiring treatment away from the scene (or a fatality, or disabling damage) must be tested - alcohol within 8 hours, drugs within 32. Refusing or disappearing is treated as a refusal, and a refusal is a career problem that outlasts the crash.