‘We’re lucky there’s no deaths’: School bus rollover renews calls to boost on-board safety

A school bus rollover in Western Manitoba has renewed the calls for seatbelts to be installed on the buses. Joseph Bernacki explains.

Rural bus driver Jodi Ruta has lost sleep over a harrowing school bus rollover on an icy western Manitoba highway that sent more than a dozen students to hospital.

“We’re lucky there’s no deaths, but no one in that bus crash is lucky,” Ruta told CTV News.

Fourteen students and a driver from Sapotaweyak Cree Nation were on their way to Swan Valley Regional Secondary School on Tuesday when the bus careened off Highway 10 and rolled several times.

Fifteen patients were sent to Swan Valley for assessment, with four of them airlifted to Health Sciences Centre in Winnipeg for treatment.

Four people suffered significant but non-life-threatening injuries.

Ruta thinks the outcome would have been different had there been added safety features on the bus.

“If we had those seatbelts, would we have had the sprains and the injuries that we had?” she said.

Ruta has been driving a school bus in Beausejour for six years while building a following on social media. She gives her online audience a glimpse of life behind the wheel while advocating for seatbelts to be made mandatory on board.

Tuesday’s collision hit her on a personal level. She too was in a crash two years ago when a pickup truck smashed into the rear-end of her bus at a railroad crossing.

“I got to watch all of my students, kids that I care about, be flung forward like rag dolls,” she recalled.

“Then I got to hear them scream and cry for their moms and their dads, and that was in a lucky crash.”

Ruta believes adding seatbelts to school buses will make them safer. Sapotaweyak Cree Nation Chief Nelson Genaille agrees.

“Seatbelts in school buses — are they mandatory? Are they available? That’s something that should be looked at in the near future.”

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew told CTV News he’s open to the conversation but wants more information about how this crash occurred.

“We have to be patient about identifying what took place in this instance before we rush to propose the right solution,” he said.

Lac du Bonnet Tory MLA Wayne Ewasko is already on board with the added safety measures.

He tabled a bill in early December that called for any school bus manufactured after 2025 to have three-point passenger seatbelts installed.

“I don’t think anybody ever would argue that we want to make sure that our kids are safe. Our students are safe from the time they get on the bus to the time they get home after school,” he said.