TOOELE, Utah — A school bus driver in Tooele was cited after a crash on Main Street Tuesday afternoon.
"Watch where you’re going,” said Sgt. Colbey Bentley with the Tooele City Police Department. "It takes just one second to look away from the roadway, and all of a sudden there’s a vehicle stopped in front of you."
A school bus rear-ended a truck at Main Street and Vorwaller Drive in Tooele while the truck was waiting for someone to cross the street. The school bus was going southbound on Main Street.
"It’s a work-style truck, so it has a ladder rack on the top of it," Bentley said. "There was some rain gutter type material on top of that, that was hanging out the back, so the bus hit the Ford F-150, that metal rain gutter went through the windshield of the bus."
Police said the bus had 54 elementary school kids and 16 teachers coming back from a field trip to the zoo. The truck driver was taken to the hospital, but is expected to be okay. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt.
"Extremely grateful,” said Sgt. Bentley. “We have kids who could have been seriously hurt, even the bus driver, if that rain gutter would have went through a different section of that windshield. We could have had a fatality here."
Police said they still don’t know who that pedestrian was, and that person was not in a crosswalk, so they want to remind people not to cross the street without a crosswalk.
"Use our crosswalks. There’s reasons specifically just like this why we can’t have people crossing the road right here,” said Bentley.
The school bus driver was cited for following too close. We don’t know how long he has been a bus driver for.
