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  • February 8, 2025
Competent federal oversight could have prevented the fatal migrant bus crash (editorial board opinion)

Competent federal oversight could have prevented the fatal migrant bus crash (editorial board opinion)

Federal crash investigators blame lax enforcement of truck safety rules, loopholes in labor and vehicle registration laws and New York’s weak seat belt laws for the deaths of six migrant workers in a horrific bus-truck crash in the North Country on Jan. 28, 2023.

The preliminary findings from the National Transportation Safety Board goes into this in more detail a story reported in May by Rylee Kirk of syracuse.com and Michelle Breidenbach in May. The reporters interviewed survivors, family members and a witness and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. So was the article published in Spanish so that families of the dead and injured workers in Mexico and Venezuela could read it.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy opened a public hearing last week by praising the reporters’ work. They gave a human face to the migrant workers who died and were injured in the crash; highlighted the heroic efforts of a Good Samaritan who stopped to help; and highlighted several shortcomings in federal and state oversight of transportation.

The NTSB found that LBFNY, the owner of the minibus transporting migrant workers to install a solar panel farm, evaded a federal order to cease operations due to its poor safety record by registering the bus in Montana . The bus also did not have working seat belts, causing passengers to be “unseated and injured” during the collision.

The NTSB also accused the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of allowing the box truck owner, Aero Global Logistics, to operate its fleet unsafely for years despite numerous safety deficiencies. The NTSB cited driver fatigue as a factor in the crash and criticized the company for poor training, lack of driver supervision and lack of lane keeping technology that would have alerted the driver when he crossed the center line crossed before hitting the bus.

“Not only are we dealing with a fatal accident between two motor carriers, we are also dealing with a fatal accident between two motor carriers who have actively worked to avoid surveillance by concealing their identities,” Homendy said. “It’s these types of crashes, and so many others we’ve investigated, that make me wonder what the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is doing.”

Indeed. When you put together the NTSB investigation and the reporting from syracuse.com, it’s pretty easy to tell what the FMCSA is not doing. It does not take into account the fact that trucking companies with poor safety records “change their shirts” to become new entities with suddenly clean safety records. The safety requirements for new carriers are not particularly strict. Its interventions and oversight do not prevent unsafe carriers from operating. It does not incorporate on-road performance data into the methodology for determining the suitability of a motor vehicle.

In addition to addressing these shortcomings at FMCSA, we support the Safety Council’s other calls to action:

  • New York state lawmakers should require the use of seat belts in all vehicle positions equipped with them, a recommendation the agency made nationwide in 2014 and again in New York after a Fatal limousine crash in 2018 in Schoharie. Current seat belt laws only apply to front seat passengers and rear seat passengers under the age of 16.
  • Montana and other states with lax vehicle registration requirements should implement simple safeguards to prevent unsafe motor carriers from evading “out of service” orders that should keep them off the road.
  • The U.S. Department of Labor should expand its safety inspections of housing and transportation for migrant workers. The law only applies to those who work seasonally on fruit and vegetable farms, not to those who work in other sectors such as solar farms.

The NTSB deeply investigates only a few transportation accidents each year. Last week’s hearing was the agency’s fourth in 2024. We can conclude that they chose this crash to highlight the federal government’s poor oversight of the more than 14 million trucks and buses drive on national roads every year. We all share the highways with them – and can be injured or killed in an instant if owners and drivers ignore safety rules.

Not all crashes can be prevented, but some can – including this one, if everyone had done their job.

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Editorials represent the collective opinion of the editorial staff of Advance Media New York. Our opinions are independent of reporting. Read our mission statement. Members of the editorial board are Tim Kennedy, Trish LaMonte and Marie Morelli.

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