Survivors, responders recall '89 bus wreck

ALTON — The unease sets in the same time each year.

The jangled nerves. The tremors. The recurring dreams — each with dozens of small hands pressed against closed bus windows and the screams of 81 children trapped at the bottom of a flooded caliche pit. Ultimately, 21 children died.

Many of the survivors and witnesses of the 1989 Alton bus crash describe the same annual September disquiet.

For Luis Guerrero, the first firefighter to come upon the site, it sneaks up like a shadow each year.

"I just start feeling bad in late August," he said. "Then, I remember, it’s that time of year again."

Twenty years ago Monday, this city north of Mission witnessed what remains the worst school bus accident in the state’s history. Twenty-one middle and high school students died after their bus plunged off the road into a 40-foot pit filled with smoky, brackish water.

The wreck brought swarms of media, carpetbagging lawyers and multi-million dollar settlements to the rural town. And in many ways, it left wounds that still have not fully healed.

Two decades have now passed, but a mere mention of the event still stirs jealousies spawned over payouts in excess of $100 million, tears for classmates and relatives long lost and questions surrounding how the emergency response was handled.

Some of those involved have moved on to lives filled with successful careers and families of their own , while others still define themselves by what they saw and experienced that day.

"It really wasn’t unlike what happened on 9/11 a couple of years ago," Alton’s current city manager, Jorge Arcaute, said. "Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing."

THE CRASH

Cynthia Cantu remembers down to the clothes she was wearing.

Then a 17-year-old cheerleader, she had been up late the night before studying for a trigonometry test and had started her senior year focused on graduating in the National Honor Society.

"I was feeling good about the test," she said. "I got all dressed up, curled my hair, put on my fuchsia blouse."

With her books under her arm, she boarded the bus that morning and buried her head in her notes.

Bus 6 continued its usual route picking up students like 16-year-old Anna Delia Rodriguez — who babysat for many of the families in the neighborhood — and brothers David and Michael Saenz.

Teens crammed into seats three-deep, gossiping about boyfriends and girlfriends or joking with those standing in the aisles about the football game scheduled that weekend.

Cantu, though, kept her head down poring over sines and cosines — until she felt the hit.

"I heard something," she said. "I looked up, but I couldn’t really see what was going on."

Just as the bus had passed through the intersection of Bryan and Five Mile roads, a Dr Pepper delivery truck barreled through a stop sign, sending the school bus off course and over the rim of the open pit.

While the truck driver would later claim his brakes had failed, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that his "inattention" and "subsequent failure to maintain sufficient control of his vehicle" made the crash worse than it would have been.

For the 81 students inside, the impact mattered far less, though, than the plunge into 21-feet of water below.

"It happened so fast," Cantu said. "I just remember everyone flying toward the front of the bus. Then I blacked out."

‘GET ME ALL THE WHITE SHEETS YOU’VE GOT’

Luis Guerrero had driven past the scene moments before the call came in over his radio.

Fresh off the graveyard shift at a McAllen electronics company, the volunteer firefighter had seen the Dr Pepper truck on the side of the road but hadn’t given it a second glance.

"Even when I went back out there, I didn’t see anything," he said. "Someone had to tell me to look down into the pit."

What he saw stopped him cold. A few teens had already managed to escape the sinking vehicle. The screams of several more echoed throughout the ravine. Meanwhile, bus driver Gilberto Peña frantically tried to rescue as many as he could.

Guerrero scrambled down the embankment, swam to the upended vehicle and joined him. Since the bus was on its side, the easiest way to get the teens out seemed to be to pull them through the windows, he said.

"I got some from the hair. I pulled some from the mouth," he said. "I didn’t mean to get them out that way, but I had to do it anyway I could."

Victor Navarro, another volunteer firefighter, arrived moments later. While dozens of people had gathered at the lip of the caliche pit, only three or four had made the trek down its steep sides to help the students below.

"I kept thinking, ‘Why the hell is everyone standing around?’" he said. "I told the chief, ‘Get me all the white sheets you’ve got.’"

‘WE WERE OVERWHELMED’

At Mission High School, the failure of Bus 6 to arrive that morning had not gone unnoticed.

"We had been notified that there had been a crash," then-principal Gus Zapata recalled. "But we didn’t really know the extent of it."

Until the parents showed up.

Having heard early reports on the local news, hordes of concerned mothers and fathers arrived at the campus, clamoring for any information they could get.

"We started using the intercom as a way of letting parents know what children were at the school and which ones weren’t," Zapata said.

The school district dispatched a team of counselors — including Zapata’s wife, Rosa — to the crash site to deal with the growing crowd of onlookers there.

But nothing in Rosa Zapata’s years of training prepared her for what she found.

Dozens of emergency vehicles crowded the roads surrounding the site, blocking traffic for miles. When she and her colleagues finally made it to the rim of the caliche pit, they were bombarded by spectators looking for anyone who appeared to be there in an official capacity.

"One lady just kept saying over and over, ‘Tell them to lift the bus up,’" she said. "But they couldn’t. There was no way."

Rosa Zapata immediately went to work finding families with children on the bus. But with the rescue operation still in progress and so many unanswered questions, her efforts felt scattered and ineffective at the time.

"Our job was to help the students stay in school, do well in school and graduate from school," she said. "We hadn’t had any kind of special training. We were overwhelmed."

‘I KNEW I WAS GOING TO DIE THERE’

Cantu, the 17-year-old cheerleader, woke up deep in the murky water.

Unable to swim, she wriggled her way to an open window in an attempt to pull herself out but was pushed aside in the mass of twisted limbs.

"It was dark, and I couldn’t see many people," she said. "It seemed like I had pushed so far to get there."

As her breath grew short, she cupped her hands together and pulled them to her mouth, hoping to catch a bubble of air.

"I didn’t think I had the strength to get back to the window again," she said. "I knew I was going to die there."

Then, someone yanked at her hair. Her neighbor — Eric Rubio, who had already escaped — reached down and pulled Cantu out.

She emerged into chaos.

By that time, dozens of emergency vehicles with blaring sirens had converged on the scene. Wailing parents looked down in panic. And those who had made it out scampered up the pit walls like jackrabbits, firefighter Navarro remembered.

Cantu, however, returned to the windows, grabbing at anyone she could find below. Having followed her mother — a nurse — to a CPR class the week before, she put her skills to quick work to revive her friend, Stella Flores.

Michael Saenz, 14, had escaped once already but plunged back into the water in search of his 13-year-old brother. Neither made it back out.

Guerrero, the firefighter, managed to pull 12 more teens from the wreckage before passing out from exhaustion. As emergency responders carried him off on a stretcher, another one caught his eye.

"There was a little chubby kid stuck in one of the windows," he said. "I was watching him drown in front of me."

‘ALL COVERED UP’

Dora Rodriguez — whose daughter Anna Delia was among those who died — still remembers staring down at the 18 corpses wrapped in white sheets with tennis shoes sticking out from the end. In all, another three would die before the week was through.

"All covered up, we couldn’t tell anything," she said. "I didn’t want to believe it at first. But she was there."

As the morning humidity gave way to oppressive afternoon heat, the 60 students who had survived eventually made their way back to their families, while parents who lost children gathered together in grief.

But few had spared much thought yet to what would come next:

The funerals — one after another with hearses lined up bumper-to-bumper at local cemeteries.

The finger-pointing that played out in years of civil and criminal trials.

And the emotional baggage heaped on a city that had just lost 21 of its youngest generation.

"You just never expected something that bad would happen in our little town," Guerrero said.

The city of Alton was never the same.