Quick Take
A UC Santa Cruz bus drove off the road Tuesday night and struck a lime kiln near the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn. In a campuswide email Wednesday, administrators confirmed that six people were injured, two critically; five are students and one is a university employee.
Six people were injured, including two critically, after a UC Santa Cruz bus ran off the road and crashed into a historic lime kiln near the main entrance to campus Tuesday night.
The bus crashed shortly after 8:30 p.m. not far from the Cowell Ranch Hay Barn, in the area of Coolidge Drive near High Street.
UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive and Campus Provost Lori Kletzer wrote in a campuswide email Wednesday that two people were taken to the hospital with serious injuries and four others are receiving medical care for minor to moderate injuries. The injured include five students and an employee, according to their email.
Three of the crash victims were treated at Dominican Hospital and released, Dignity Health spokesperson Allison Hendrickson said Wednesday.
“Our thoughts and hearts are with our students and our employee, and all of their families and friends during this difficult time,” Larive and Kletzer wrote. “We are working to provide support for those affected by this collision and hoping for a complete recovery.”
The administrators also asked that everyone avoid the area of the collision because the lime kiln that the bus hit was damaged and could have structural issues.
On Wednesday morning, the damaged bus sat behind a locked gate at the police station.
“We’re concerned about the driver and the students,” UCSC Assistant Transit Manager Stevan Raaymakers told Lookout. He said the campus has 27 drivers and 24 buses, but declined further comment. Dan Henderson, executive director of UC Santa Cruz’s Transportation and Parking Services (TAPS) declined to comment.
A campus police dispatcher told Lookout that UCSC Police Chief Kevin Domby was unavailable and directed a request for comment on the investigation into the cause of the crash to the school’s media relations department.
UCSC spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason said Wednesday afternoon that he couldn’t provide further information about the people injured or the cause of the crash. “We don’t have more to share at this moment, but we will certainly share more as we learn it through the course of the investigation,” he said.
Hernandez-Jason said he didn’t know whether a bus maintenance issue was to blame for the incident or whether the bus involved in the accident had any prior issues. He said all campus shuttles undergo regular maintenance and pre-trip inspections.
However, he said that the university had pulled all buses similar to the one involved in the crash off the road Wednesday.
“Out of an abundance of caution, UC Santa Cruz today is providing transit services using 30-foot shuttles and other smaller shuttles while we conduct additional inspections on all of our 35-foot shuttles that are similar to the one involved in the crash,” he wrote.
Across social media, several UCSC students said they had previously raised concerns about the school’s aging buses, including after a loop bus caught fire near Oakes College last month.
“The loop buses on campus are not only unreliable and overcrowded, but in my opinion, seriously unsafe,” third-year UCSC student Sebastián Valdez wrote in an opinion piece in Lookout in October. He wrote that the buses are more than 30 years old, that TAPS cut bus hours because of mechanical issues and the resignation of several drivers, and that the transit agency has had to source parts on eBay and Craigslist because they are no longer being manufactured.
“According to drivers,” Valdez wrote, “this translates to regular breakdowns due to mechanical failures in the buses’ cooling systems, transmissions, air brake systems and several other parts.”
A UCSC transit employee who declined to give their name told Lookout that they didn’t have safety concerns about the buses. “I haven’t really had any safety concerns that could cause possible accidents,” they said. “They’re old buses, but maintenance has been able to keep them up.”
Transit staff were performing routine checks on other buses to make sure there are no maintenance problems that could have contributed to a similar crash, the employee said.
When asked about students’ concerns around maintenance and safety of the buses, Hernandez-Jason reiterated that the campus does regular inspections of its bus fleet.
“We are prioritizing safety and we’ll thoroughly investigate this to understand what happened and make sure that we do what we are able to prevent such things from happening again,” he said.
Have something to say? Lookout welcomes letters to the editor, within our policies, from readers. Guidelines here.