Worse Bus Accident in the Country for Many Years
On February 28, 1958, a loaded Floyd County school bus collided with a wrecker truck and plunged into the Big Sandy River. The bus was swept downstream and eventually submerged. Twenty-six children and the bus driver all lost their lives. There were twenty-two survivors.
Detailed Information
Prestonsburg School Bus Disaster
Booklet: Kentucky National Guard 50TH Anniversary Rememberance Prestonburg School Bus Diaster
Book: One Minute to Live: 1958 School Bus Accident
Cause of '58 Bus Disaster Still A Mystery
Crash that killed 27 Left Its Mark on Survivors
Extract from the Lexington Herald-Leader (28-Feb-1988)
Prestonsburg--The morning of Feb. 28, 1958 was cloudy and cold, but the pavement on old U.S. 23 above Lancer was dry. About 7 a.m., bus driver John Alex DeRossett began his usual route from Cow Creek to consolidated schools in Prestonsburg, stopping to collect students in the communities of Sugar Loaf and Emma. The bus would never reach the schools. It would plunge into Levisa Fork of the Big Sandy River, killing 26 students and the bus driver. The crash happened 30 years ago today and remains the worst school bus accident in US history.
DeRossett was on schedule. Unlike an older bus he had driven the day before--a bus one student described as having its rear emergency door wired shut--Bus No. 27 had just been serviced. About 8:10 a.m., three miles east of Prestonsburg at the mouth of Knotley Hollow, DeRossett pulled off the main road where two 14-year-old freshman girls, Ezelle Pennington and Joyce Matney, stood hugging their books and waiting with six other students. Joyce, a band member, and Ezelle were best friends. both wore fashionably long skirts, bobby socks, loafers and sweaters. A week earlier, they had rdred identical Easter outfits. Now, they discussed a forthcoming Prestonsburg High School basketball game. With them stood Joyce Matney's little sister, Rita Cheryl, 8, who had blue-green eyes and reddish hair. Rita Cheryl was "a doll--the prettiest little girl that ever was," said Ezelle Pennington Copley, now 44 and a resident of East Point. The eight students climbed aboard. Someone asked Joyce Matney what her grandfather's pickup was doing "down there in the ditch line." About 200 yards down the highway, a pickup was mired to its axles in the ditch alongside the road. A wrecker driven by Donald "Dootney" Horn was maneuvering across the road to pull it out. Because the bus was almost full, Joyce and Ezelle took separate seats. Joyce and her little sister took seats near the front of the bus, while Ezelle found one near the back, a section routinely reserved for older boys.
As DeRossett changed gears, Janice Blackburn, 14, sitting with her feet against the top of a rear wheel well, loked up from her book. She saw Horn's wrecker and went back to reading. In the back of the bus, the older boys spotted the wrecker and someone predicted the bus would hit it, said Donald Dillon of Prestonsburg, who was an eighth grader. "He had plenty of time to stop if he'd wanted to. Dillon does not recall a collision. But Isaac Vanderpool, then 17, who was sitting behind the driver, said that DeRossett yelled when the bus struck the wrecker's left rear bumper and fender. Aroused students began screaming, too, when the bus turned a hard left and started toward the river, striking a parked car and narrowly missing a trailor owned by Bennie Blackburn, Ezelle Pennington Copley remembers watching Blackburn's trailor flash by as the bus slid head-first down the riverbank. "I remember thinking, "We're going to hit the trees any second," she said.