LYNDHURST, Ohio — Preparing for the unimaginable.
"You can see it on video, but unless you're in it … you don't know what to do," South-Euclid Lyndhurst school bus driver Pamela Ferguson says.
The veteran school transportation professional, with more than 30 years of experience, is sharing her thoughts after seeing a 72-passenger school bus intentionally flipped on its side to provide valuable training.
"I'm seeing this right up firsthand now, which I never have seen it (the bus) like that," Ferguson explained. "It was kind of scary looking at it … the damage that's done to the bus, so you could imagine what's going on inside the bus."
The joint evacuation training between the Lyndhurst and South Euclid fire departments with the South Euclid-Lyndhurst City School District has a goal of making sure the district's transportation staff, along with firefighters, are prepared for a rollover crash.
"This allows us to see it, feel it," Lyndhurst Fire Captain Nick Martin told 3News, "and now, if we have to go on something like this, which we hope to never have to do, we're going to be more efficient. It's not going to be as big of a shock value."
According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, there have been 1,273 school bus related crashes in the state since August 2023.
The number includes the rollover crash in Clark County, near Dayton, which killed 11-year-old Aiden Clark on the first day of school. It also includes the rollover wreck in Marlboro Township in Stark County that injured 16 of the 20 people onboard.
However, firefighters at the training in front of Brush High School call rollover school bus crashes "a high-hazard, low-frequency event."
"There's not necessarily a chapter in our books on school bus extraction; it's auto extraction," Martin added. "This is a specialized thing."
There were no students involved in the training. The bus was also drained of all fluid and its battery as a safety precaution.
Firefighters ran through how to create access points into a bus for potential rescues, while about 30 SEL transportation staff watched.
"Now we know going forward what works," Martin said.
And there is a lesson for parents, too.
"We don't want you rushing to the scene," Martin stressed. "I know there's an emotion involved with that, but when you rush to the scene, you're actually clogging the system for us to do our job."
Bystanders slow down the process per Martin and are a huge burden on first responders.
"I know it's a big ask," Martin conceded. "Please don't show up direct to the scene, because that is going to take away resources to make this incident clear up quicker and to get the kids out quicker."
For Ferguson, experiencing the training has transformed her uncertainty on how to manage a chaotic rollover bus crash to confidence.
"I know what I need to do … as far as saving these kids and myself as well," she said. "Stay calm. That's the main thing to stay calm, because if you are upset and hyper … it's going to cause the kids to be the same way. They're going to panic and be scared. As the bus driver, you've got to stay calm so that you can keep them calm and get everybody off that you can safely."
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