Inured to dangerous situations

Surprised I was not when I heard that the inquiry into the accident where a schoolgirl fell out of one of Zarb Coaches' vans and was seriously injured, found that it was overloaded at the time.

The driver of the van, which had room for only 12, packed in, not 14, 16, 20 or even 24 extra pupils (twice the stipulated amount), but 28.

What surprised me is that nowhere in the press had we seen this information at the time of the accident. Did no members of our sizable media find this out?

And did no one with responsibility at the school notice before the van took off? Did the van not pass by one single policeman with its load of students falling all over the place inside the van? Or one single conscientious observer?

"During the trip, the standing students started swinging from one side to the other and falling over each other... the driver was speaking on his mobile... the driver did not stop immediately after students were shouting that the back door had burst open and a girl had fallen out" are snippets from the report.

And are Zarb Coaches' vans (a member of the Unscheduled Bus Service, the main contractor) and other UBS vans still on the road and still carrying schoolchildren? Of course they are.

This despite the fact that the inquiry report, tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, established that both had violated contract conditions, and said that UBS should shoulder responsibility and answer for what had happened and that the garage (I assume this means Zarb Coaches) and the driver should answer for the consequences.

Now we know that the Transport Authority acted immediately and suspended the driver's licence. But that is not enough. The behaviour identified in the report is not exclusive to the driver involved in the accident but is typical of these van drivers.

Standards have to be set and maintained if we are to ensure our school transport is safe.

Letters in the papers from concerned parents over the years had raised the alarm about the appalling school bus service. But, as with everything else, we get ground down, stop complaining and move on until an accident happens because nothing was done about the unsafe practice we complained about, and the wheel goes on turning.

The result is that we become inured to dangerous situations and we ignore things like overloaded school vans driving past us, until an accident happens and we are shocked back into sensitivity.

We all know that these vans were often overloaded, and that their drivers drove recklessly. We did not need an inquiry to tell us that. We see it every day.

Not only was the van dangerously overcrowded, but the report found that the driver had been using his mobile phone while driving and that he did not stop the van immediately after the girl fell out of the rear van door, which rather indicates that he was going too fast and/or not concentrating on the job in hand.

However, after it was established that various contract conditions had been violated which obviously endangered passengers, the recommendations are more like guidelines for standards which should have been in place on the day UBS were given the contract anyway.

We should have seen much stronger recommendations, like ending the present contract forthwith, quoting gross negligence as the cause. Instead this is what we got:

1. ''The contractor should inform whoever performed school trips about the contract conditions laid down by the Education Division and the transport association of state schools".

The contractor should be sacked and the Education authorities should ensure that the new contractors abide by the contract stipulations, would have been more what I would have liked to see.

This recommendation is weak because it creates a loophole for the contracting company.

It can deny accountability by saying that it did "inform" whoever performed the school trips, but the instructions were not followed.

The contracted company, which includes any sub-contractor, must abide by the contract conditions laid down, would have been a much clearer and more specific requirement.

But I am confused. Because a) it is obvious that a contracted firm has to abide by the contract conditions and b) it is common sense that whoever is sub contracted must abide by the rules of the main contractor.

This of course opens up a can of health and safety worms, since I am sure the sub-contractor loophole is manipulated widely across many sectors. But let's stick to this sector for today.

The type of van involved, a tail-lifter, in the accident contravened the contract. Even if Emmanuel Zarb of Zarb Coaches had said that the "tail-lifter van" was used because the coach was out of order, that is no excuse. Besides "no conclusive evidence had been given to this effect".

The report also established that the tail-lifter van had been used several times before, but whereas in the past two vans were used to accommodate all the students, only one tail-lifter van was provided on this occasion.

But hang on a minute; I thought that the tail-lifter van contravened the contract. So how come the Education Division had accepted this in the past?

Besides, if the vans can only take 12, then two vans can only take 24. Yet if all the students were accommodated in the past, i.e. 28, then they were still overloaded in vans which contravened the contract.

The problem with most of the recommendations is that they should not be recommendations. They are the way things should have been done, i.e. they are failings in the system. For example, "there should be frequent inspections of school transport by the authorities" should have been happening. Considering the complaints in the past did it really need a serious accident and an inquiry to establish this point.

Real recommendations would be to a) get rid of the current contract holders and b) establish tough deterrents to ensure new contractors know the Education Division means business.

phansen@timesofmalta.com