Proper federal oversight could have prevented fatal migrant bus crash (Editor’s Opinion)

Federal accident investigators blame the deaths of six migrant workers in a horrific bus and truck accident in the North Country on January 28, 2023, on lax enforcement of trucking safety laws, loopholes in labor laws and vehicle registration and weak seat belt laws in New York.

The preliminary arrangements National Transportation Safety Board to delve deeper into this issue story told in May by Rylee Kirk and Michelle Breidenbach of syracuse.com in May. Reporters interviewed survivors, family members and a witness and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. There was an article too published in Spanish so that families of dead and injured workers in Mexico and Venezuela can read it.

NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy opened last week’s public hearing by praising the work of reporters. They put a human face on migrant workers killed and injured in the disaster; highlighted the heroic efforts of the Good Samaritan who stopped to help; and highlighted various deficiencies in federal and state transportation oversight.

The NTSB determined that LBFNY, the owner of a minibus transporting migrant workers to install a solar panel farm, dodged a federal cease-and-desist order due to its poor safety record by registering the bus in Montana. There were also no functional seat belts on the bus, which resulted in the passengers “falling out of their seats and sustaining injuries” as a result of the collision.

The NTSB also accused the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration of allowing the box truck’s owner, Aero Global Logistics, to operate its fleet unsafely for years despite numerous safety lapses. The NTSB cited driver fatigue as the cause of the crash and criticized the company for poor training, failure to monitor the driver and lack of lane-keeping technology that would have warned the driver when he crossed the center line before hitting the bus.

“We’re not just dealing with a fatal collision between two motor carriers, we’re dealing with a fatal collision between two motor carriers who actively sought to avoid being overlooked by concealing their identities,” Homendy said. “It’s accidents like this and the many others we’ve investigated that make me wonder what the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is doing.”

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Actually. Putting together the NTSB investigation and the syracuse.com reports, it’s pretty easy to say what FMCSA is NO act. It fails to recognize when trucking companies with poor safety records “change their shirts” to become new entrants with a suddenly clean safety record. Safety requirements for new carriers are less than stringent. His interventions and supervision do not prevent dangerous carriers from operating. It does not include on-road performance data in its methodology for determining motor carrier performance.

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

• New York state lawmakers should mandate seat belts in all vehicles equipped with them, a recommendation the agency issued nationwide in 2014 and again in New York after Fatal limousine accident in Schoharie in 2018. Current seat belt regulations only apply to front and rear seat passengers under the age of 16.
• Montana and other states with lax vehicle registration requirements should implement simple protections to prevent unsafe motor carriers from evading “retirement” orders designed to keep them off the road.
• The U.S. Department of Labor should expand safety inspections for the housing and transportation of migrant workers. The law applies only to people working seasonally on fruit and vegetable farms, and not to people working in other industries, e.g. photovoltaic farms.

The NTSB only analyzes a handful of traffic accidents in detail each year. Last week’s hearing was the agency’s fourth in 2024. We can infer that it chose this disaster to highlight the federal government’s poor oversight of over 14 million trucks and buses every year it travels on the country’s roads. We all share highways with them – and we can be injured or killed in the blink of an eye when owners and drivers ignore safety rules.

Not all crashes can be prevented, but some can – including this one, if everyone did their part.

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