Collision impact expert describes what made Westboro bus crash so brutal
Warning: This story contains disturbing details
Warning: This story contains disturbing details.
The damage of the January 2019 bus crash at Ottawa's Westboro station was so widely felt that, at one point, a Transport Canada expert speaking at an ongoing coroner's inquest into the tragedy had to interject in her own testimony.
"Nobody walked away without any injury," Suzanne Tylko said on Tuesday.
On Jan. 11, 2019, a packed OC Transpo double-decker slammed into a Transitway bus shelter at the west Ottawa station. Three people — Judy Booth, Bruce Thomlinson and Anja Van Beek — died in the crash. Many others were injured, triggering a flurry of lawsuits.
While the city accepted civil responsibility for the crash, the bus driver was charged with 38 counts of dangerous driving causing death or bodily harm. She was acquitted of all of them in a judge-only trial in 2021.
The inquest is hearing from a range of witnesses in the hopes of coming up with ways to prevent similar calamities.
Tylko is an expert in "crashworthiness," which refers to a vehicle's ability to protect its occupants during a collision. Crashworthiness is among the chief focuses of the inquest.
In Tylko's opinion, there was no feasible way to structurally reinforce the double-decker involved in the Westboro crash to prevent the section of shelter that it struck from penetrating so deeply into the bus's top right side, where Booth, Thomlinson and Van Beek were all seated.
"We can argue about the exact speed at which the bus struck the canopy, but the fact that the canopy made its way all the way to the ninth row is indicative of the tremendous amount of energy that was applied to that area of the bus," Tylko said.
'Unfortunately aligned'
The narrow-edged shape and rigidness of the canopy combined with the height at which the double-decker struck it were factors that made the Westboro crash unique in its devastation, Tylko explained.
"The narrower the object, the more concentrated the forces are going to be," Tylko said. "And the more concentrated the forces are, the more difficult it is for that [vehicle] shell to remain intact.
"Think of a knife edge. A knife edge is intentionally sharp so that it can cut through things. So it's the same thing with a pole, for instance, that you would hit on the side of the road. It is much more difficult to maintain the integrity of the shell."
Standing 25 centimetres above the floor of the upper deck, or what Tylko described as low- to mid-leg height, the canopy was "unfortunately aligned" with the upper-deck passengers.
"This was a horrific accident, and as this canopy was penetrating inside the bus, it was picking up the seats with it and pushing them back," Tylko said, adding if the canopy had been lower it may have been slowed down by the floor of the bus.
Tylko ended the main part of her testimony, as have many other witnesses, by offering her condolences to the families affected by the crash.
"But this [inquest] is so important because that's what allows us to learn and move forward and improve safety for everyone," she said.
The inquest is expected to hear from someone at the City of Ottawa about Transitway stations similar to Westboro.
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