Bus tragedy: 50 years later

Tim Preston/The Independent

Prestonsburg April 28, 2008 11:36 pm

— Those who were around Floyd County 50 years ago remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard 27 children had been killed in the nation’s worst school bus disaster.
“I was in eighth grade and there were two on the bus from my room — Katie Jarrell and her brother Bucky Jarrell,” said Oakie Sparks, pausing from a tour of the portraits of former Floyd County Rescue Squad members, a few frames shy of his own image.
“I can remember it like it was yesterday. I remember somebody came running into the school to see if their daughter had made it there yet. Then I remember all of those parents coming to school to see if their kids had made it.”
The tragedy galvanized community efforts to build a rescue squad that would be an effective force in Floyd County.
Bud Alexander, who joined the squad roughly a year after it was formed, recalled his wife’s father calling them with the bad news. The effort to get the community behind an all-volunteer rescue squad with no government support “was real easy at the time because it was still fresh on everybody’s mind,” he said.
“After the last body was found, they really got with it,” he said, recalling the community’s support for the unit’s formation.
With a modernized arsenal of tools, boats and training, rescue squad members said they are far better prepared to handle some of the toughest rescue scenarios imaginable.
“When this happened 50 years ago, nobody knew what they were doing,” one said, as another noted, “We were working with surplus army equipment. We had to make what we had.”
The squad began with plenty of motivation and not much else. Founders said they were fortunate to bid $1 each for a dozen 12-foot aluminum V-hulled boats. Volunteers spent time in their workshops to develop drag lines and other implements to locate bodies of drowning victims.
Even with 50 years of service to the community, squad members say the still depend entirely upon the community’s support to meet the demands of their budget.
“The challenge today? Any more it is money,” one said. “Basically, it is money. We have good people and we have good equipment, but we do rely on the generosity of these good people to keep it going.”
Another added, “We do have younger people coming in. We had two join last week.”
Second Lt. James Allen said he feels today’s rescue squad members are among the state’s most well trained.
“We’re one of the very few swift water teams certified in the state of Kentucky,” he said, citing the group’s training at location in Tennessee as well as in the New River.
That training, he said, has already proven useful in local flooding situations.
“Now it is just natural to us,” he said, explaining they assisted four people and eight horses during flooding in 1985.
State Sen. Johnny Ray Turner, among the visiting dignitaries and elected officials who joined rescue workers, firefighters and other emergency personnel during Sunday’s celebration, said he was also surprised to recently learn the Floyd County Rescue Squad is entirely community supported. While he did not cite a dollar figure, Turner said he was “honored to say we did put some money in the budget for the Floyd County Rescue Squad.”
TIM PRESTON can be reached at tpreston@dailyindependent.com or (606) 326-2651.