First Responder Crash Response: Inside the Emotional Aftermath of a School Bus Collision

On August 22, tragedy struck Ohio’s Northwestern Local School District when a school bus collision claimed the life of 11-year-old Aiden Clark and left 23 others injured.

The incident spurred the formation of the Ohio School Bus Safety Working Group, dedicated to scrutinizing school bus safety and critical incident protocols.

Chief Tim Holman of German Township Fire & EMS in Clark County shared insights and emotional challenges faced by first responders during a recent address to the group. Holman described the difficulties faced by the first responders, including bystanders attempting to overturn the bus.

“The crew tried to stop them. They got somewhat violent with them,” he says. “They backed off and focused on the students that were hurt.”

Law enforcement worked to secure the scene, “but trying to keep parents out of there was really hard,” Holman says. “They’d grab their kid and take off. We’re saying, ‘Wait, we’ve got to get the name’.”

He praised the school bus driver and elementary school principal for their evacuation and reunification efforts, but accountability became an issue.

“Try to stop a mother from taking her child home,” Holman says. “That’s just going to escalate things.”

Andy Wilson, the group’s chairperson and Ohio Department of Public Safety director, notes, “What I’ve seen in any critical incident in reunification and accountability is it’s incredibly important to know the exact number of victims you're dealing with because you need to know where they're at and whether or not they've been treated.”

Holman says it was unclear why the school district didn’t follow the emergency operation plan. Instead of taking the students to a local church as planned, they were transported to a fire station. And on top of that, an influx of people, fueled by social media coverage, created chaos.

“We also had to keep taking care of calls,” Holman says. “We couldn't get trucks out because there were so many people there. Parents weren’t leaving the scene. If we sent them to the church, parents would have followed. That would have cleared things up and made things a lot smoother for us.”

The Day of the Collision

German Township Fire & EMS has eight full-time and 31 part-time people who cover 48 square miles of farmland, and residential and commercial properties. Two crews work around the clock. The department does about 2,000 runs a year.

On the day of the accident, the 911 call came in at 8:12 a.m. The crew was dispatched at 8:14 a.m. and departed from the scene with the first two patients at 8:31 a.m.

“When you get dispatched to something like this, you’re pre-planning as you go,” Holman says. But as a school bus rollover, this call was different from other bus accidents, given the possibility someone was trapped.

No one in the department had been on a mass casualty incident besides Holman, who had been on three, but none like this. The lieutenant on the call was two months into the job. The responder on the medic unit had only been an EMT for a year.

They told Holman their pulse rate and respirations immediately went up.

“That’s emotions, stress,” Holman says. “That’s a horrific scene to roll up on. The other arriving unit said the agony of not knowing what they were up against is what they struggled with.”

There were 51 people on the bus. Quick response and effective triage, despite the emotional strain, were critical during the incident.

“We had overall command and then EMS command,” says Holman. “They both did an excellent job to dispatch. Think about a dispatcher hearing all this. They want to do something, so they did an ‘all call.’ The problem was they didn't tell command. They got all these EMS units. They finally stopped and command started getting it more organized.”

Two helicopters that had been called in were canceled.

“In a stressful or critical incident, you rise or fall to the level of your actual training,” says Wilson. “We know scenario-based realistic training is the best way to have a better understanding of how you're going to react and what you're going to do in those situations.”

Holman's Experience with Tragedy

Holman says his department participates in training purposely set up to be stressful, though according to him, first responders can’t train or prepare for the emotions they get on scene. Holman himself has firsthand experience with this.

One of his first runs when he first came on board with the department was a triple fatality involving three 16-year-old girls. Two were dead upon arrival.

“The third one grabbed my hand and asked me, ‘Please don't let me die,’” he says. “That’s the last thing she said. That got to me.”

He had a tear running down his face upon returning to the station. Some of the older crew members told him to suck it up.

“So, I sucked it up,” he says. “You push that stuff down, so you don't have to deal with it.”

But Holman had nightmares and suffered from PTSD.  

Sima Merick, Ohio Emergency Management Agency executive director, notes the mental health aspects of the work entail “the frightened piece, the emotional piece, the ‘flight or fight’ thing we all experience no matter what we're doing in emergency management.”

The station’s culture has since changed, Holman says. Talking is encouraged. The crew is quick to help others who are hurting.

“Whatever we can do to make their jobs easier,” Holman says. “I think that’s why we have longevity.”

In heading up the post-incident debriefing, Holman told the crew, “I want to talk about that because everybody did what you were supposed to do. But we've got to talk about the emotions behind this. This incident is over, but the lingering effects of this will go on for years. That’s what we need to focus on.”

Holman has ongoing conversations with two responders now in counseling.

He suggests for incident response to run smoother; school officials should be trained in incident command and fire and EMS need to know the school language.

“The school should be part of that unified command to help make those decisions,” he adds.

Grothause says a reunification plan for school-related incidents should include a multidisciplinary team of first responders as well as a special education director who knows the access and functional needs requirements for students whose disabilities require different approaches.

Lasting Impacts, On- and Off-Scene

According to Lieutenant Molly Harris of the Ohio State Highway Patrol, when we talk about critical incidents like these, we initially think of the kids that were on there, their parents, and first responders, but that trauma and the vicarious trauma can have a ripple effect on people who might’ve not been on the scene.

“I have a five-year-old son and getting him on the school bus the very next morning was difficult,” she says.  

Harris is the commander of her agency’s peer support team for first responders. The team was trained in de-escalation techniques including active listening, grounding, and breathing techniques, and was on hand after the Ohio school bus incident.

Therapy dogs were deployed at the debriefing and reunification sites following the Nov. 14 incident in Lincoln County, Ohio when a charter bus transporting students was rear-ended by a semi-truck, killing six.

“There is a ton of research showing therapy canines are so powerful when it comes to these large-scale events and reducing that anxiety,” says Harris.

Harris says one technique being used by clinicians is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

“You don't lose that memory, but it desensitizes it, and it allows it to file it appropriately in your brain,” she says.

According to Harris, the stigma that first responders are stoic and don’t feel emotional in these situations can be challenging.

While first responders are given the equipment to perform their duties, “they don’t give us a body that handles stress and trauma any differently than the average person outside of the first responder world,” she explains.

In the crash that killed Aiden Clark, not only did a debriefing held by trained experts attract first responders, school nurses, school counselors, and others, but they also attended a community vigil including family members and friends.

“People don’t realize how important it is to take care of ourselves as first responders because those things do affect us,” says Harris. “It is OK to not be OK and talk about those things affecting us because those critical incidents are extremely impactful when it comes to seeing those things one right after another after another.

“Our backpacks get full and it's okay to unload those and talk about some of those things that are going on so we don’t suffer from things such as PTSD or even some of those stress signs and symptoms that come along with that.”