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AP - The bus had been on the interstate about an hour when the spring breakers and other travelers headed toward the U.S.-Mexico border heard a noise and then felt the bus flip around before toppling on its side in a grassy median.




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"Bus drive shafts rarely break and completely fall off, said Joe Pemberton, whose Glendale, Ariz.-based company, Motorcoach Training & Development Inc., trains and certifies bus mechanics. Newer buses are equipped with a safety strap designed to catch a broken shaft so that it doesn't completely destabilize the bus. But such devices can fail, and if one does, the shaft can snag on the pavement and turn the bus over, Pemberton said.

"It would act like a pole vaulter," Pemberton said."
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It's not the shaft that breaks. It's the U-Joints.
School busses have regulations that should be applied to all busses. They have segmented drive shafts so they can't spear through the coach if they brake. That's the way it used to be anyway.

Then again..if that bus is a Toyota, waddya gonna do.

Spring Breakers?

Two passengers were killed — Christina Lozano Campos, 62, of Lewisville and Efrain Dominguez-Valenzuela, 27, of Brownsville — and at least two others remained hospitalized in critical condition Wednesday. The other 38 people on board were either hospitalized in stable condition or had been treated and released.

Campos was traveling to Mexico to see her mother, her neighbor, 72-year-old Melvin Goforth, said Wednesday. He said she worked in a school, and described her as "a real sweet woman, a real wonderful person." Goforth said Campos' husband was distraught.

Dominguez-Valenzuela had a wife and two young sons, said Marcela Cope, who manages the apartment complex where the family lives. She recalled that on his apartment application, he wrote that he was a bus driver.