What Happened at Pine Ridge Middle School?

Investigators believe that a tire blowout caused a school bus crash on April 18, 2025, in Pine Ridge, South Carolina.

According to the South Carolina Highway Patrol, at 1:45 p.m. Thursday, a 2021 Blue Bird school bus was traveling south on I-77 near mile marker 55 in Blackstock when a tire blew out. The bus then struck a guard rail and overturned. The crash killed one person, a 13-year-old 8th-grade student, and injured twenty-one other people. Some of these victims were airlifted to local hospitals.

Authorities, who are still investigating the cash, haven’t said how many of the injured were adults and how many were children.

What Causes Bus Crashes?

The Pine Ridge school bus crash is not an isolated incident. Partially because of a nationwide school bus driver shortage and partially due to the nature of the job, school bus drivers are often impaired. Some examples include:

• Alcohol: Many inexperienced drivers don’t fully understand their sacred trust. So, they’re personally careless. In 2024, a Minnesota school bus driver transporting seventeen children to school had a BAC of more than four times the legal limit at the time of his arrest.
• Fatigue: That arrest occurred shortly before dawn when most school bus drivers start work. Most people are naturally drowsy at this time of day. Drowsiness and alcohol have roughly the same effect on the body and brain, especially if the tortfeasor’s (negligent driver’s) daily schedule recently changed, perhaps because s/he got a new job.
• Drugs: To counteract the effects of fatigue, alcohol, or other depressants, many commercial drivers take amphetamines. These drugs help people feel more alert. But these drugs also compromise their judgment ability by making them edgy and suspicious. Additionally, these users typically crash hard when that temporary alertness wears off.
• Distraction: Most school bus drivers multitask behind the wheel. They drive the bus, adhere to a strict schedule, and monitor passengers. Many people multitask their way through their days at home, work, or school. But multitasking behind the wheel is dangerous and often deadly.

Aggressive driving, mostly speeding, also causes a significant number of bus crashes. Excessive speed increases the risk of a wreck and the amount of force in a collision.

Defective products, like defective tires, cause about 10 percent of bus crashes in Los Angeles. Usually, manufacturers are strictly liable for manufacturing and design defects if these defects substantially cause injury. Manufacturing defects are prevalent in tires. Many companies use cheap, imported parts that don’t hold up to the punishment school bus tires must take.

Frequently, these causes overlap. For example, the Pine Ridge school bus driver was probably speeding when the tire exploded. The combination of the excessive speed and tire blowout caused the driver to lose control of the bus.

School Bus Crash Injuries

The causes of school bus crashes vary, but the injuries these victims sustain are essentially the same. These injuries include one (or more) kinds of head injuries:

• sTBIs: Severe Traumatic Brain Injuries are very common when unrestrained kids have jostled around during accidents. The wild motion causes their brains to slam against the insides of their skulls. That impact causes permanent brain damage.
• mTBIs: Moderate TBIs (concussions) are a little more common in low-speed school bus crashes. Individually, concussions aren’t that serious. However, the cumulative effect of concussions causes a degenerative brain disease that’s usually fatal.
• PTSD: TBIs are trauma-induced brain injuries. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is a stress-induced brain injury. Extreme stress expands the amygdala, which is the part of the brain that controls emotional reactions. That expansion shrinks the hippocampus (logical responses). Symptoms of this imbalance include nightmares, depression, and flashbacks.

No one can reverse the effects of these injuries. A bus accident attorney in California does the next best thing: obtain the compensation these victims need and deserve.

Your Claim for Damages

We mentioned multiple school bus crash causes above. That issue alone makes these claims very complex. Two legal rules, comparative fault and joint/several liability, come into play in these situations.

Comparative fault shifts blame from one accident to another. For example, in the above story, the school district might shift blame for the crash onto the tire manufacturer. Insurance companies do the same thing if, for example, one driver was fatigued and the other was speeding.

California is a pure comparative fault state. So, compensation is still available even if a victim was mostly at fault for an accident.

If a third party, like a negligent manufacturer, contributed to the crash, the court must apply a different law. California’s joint/several liability law is far too complex to break down in this blog, but here’s the gist of it.

In the tire and driver example, if a victim obtained a judgment against the driver, the school district could ask the tire manufacturer to pay part of the damages. Fortunately, victims usually don’t have to worry about joint/several liability because it’s a post-trial matter.

The bottom line is that these claims involve many complex legal issues that only a top-notch Los Angeles personal injury lawyer can successfully resolve.

Contact Our Experienced Bus Accident Lawyers Today

School bus crashes cause tragic injuries. Contact the Law Offices of Eslamboly Hakim for a free consultation with experienced bus accident lawyers in Los Angeles. The sooner you contact us, the sooner we can start working for you.

Credit: Photo by Midjourney