The Value of Video

By Jennifer Morrison, NTSB Investigator-in-Charge, Office of Highway Safety

 On January 19, 2016, a Greyhound bus with 22 people on board was traveling on a California interstate in the dark in moderate-to-heavy wind and rain. The driver intended to take the left exit, en route to the next stop in San Jose, but instead crashed the bus head-on into the end of a concrete barrier. The bus jumped the barrier and rotated onto its side. Two passengers were ejected and died; the driver and 13 passengers were injured.

The crash occurred at 6:37 in the morning, after the driver had been on duty, commuting to his route and driving the bus, for about 12 hours. Tempting as it was to assume this crash resulted from driver fatigue, our investigation soon revealed that other factors were at play.

Final rest position of bus and remains of REACT 350 crash attenuator base

When I arrived on scene with the rest of the “go team,” we discovered that the highway interchange where the crash occurred had four through lanes, two right exit lanes, and a single left exit lane. When the driver moved the bus left to what he thought was the left exit lane, he instead unintentionally entered a 990-foot-long unmarked gore area that separated the through lanes from the left exit lane. The gore area ended at the concrete barrier where the crash occurred. The crash attenuator at the end of the barrier likely absorbed some crash energy, but it was not designed to redirect a large commercial vehicle like a Greyhound bus.

What was interesting about the crash attenuator was that it had been hit before; our investigation found that damage from the previous impact had ripped the reflective sheeting off its face. Records showed that the California Department of Transportation had placed temporary barricades but had never finished the repair.

Fortunately for our investigation, the bus, like most of Greyhound’s buses now, was equipped with a video camera system. Video recovered from the bus showed that the temporary barricades had blown over, possibly in the wind and rain that morning. As we watched the forward-facing and inward-facing videos, the scene became clear: the driver was attentive as he signaled and moved into the gore area, interpreting it to be a travel lane. At 1 second before impact, a dark black barrel (the first part of the crash attenuator) appeared in the middle of the “lane” (see Figure 1). There was no reflective sheeting on its face, and there were no temporary barricades set up to identify the hazard.

Without the video camera system onboard the bus, it would’ve been impossible to know that the barricades had blown over prior to the crash, rather than simply been displaced by the event. Without the video evidence, it would have been easy to assume that the driver was just too tired or otherwise distracted by fatigue to see the warning. But the video showed clearly and indisputably the events leading up to the crash.

Still image of onboard video at 1 second prior to impact.

Onboard video systems provide investigators and fleet owners with the invaluable, unbiased evidence to interpret—and work to prevent—crashes like this one. That’s why we’ve strongly recommended they be installed on all highway vehicles for decades. We even emphasize the importance of these systems on our Most Wanted List of transportation safety improvements. This crash illustrates why this technology is important, and we continue to urge operators to install it across their fleets.

To learn more about this issue, join us Thursday, September 13 at 2 PM EST, for our “Reducing CMV Crashes Through the Use of Video Recorders webinar.” In our 1-hr webinar, NTSB Member Bella Dinh-Zarr, investigators and recorder analysts from the Office of Highway Safety and Office of Research and Engineering, along with commercial fleet owners representing the truck and bus industries, will discuss why and how their organizations use video recorders to improve safety. NTSB investigators will provide an in-depth discussion into the Greyhound crash discussed in this blog and will also highlight a truck case study. For more details or to register, visit this link.