EDITORIAL: Crumpled bus sends powerful message about impaired driving

Published 1:05 pm Monday, June 3, 2024

It’s easy to describe in words the potential effects of driving while intoxicated or impaired.

Crashes.

Fines.

Injuries.

Deaths.

But even the most compelling written or oral description lacks the visceral power of seeing a vehicle that looks as though someone had competed with it in a demolition derby.

On Thursday, May 30, a crumpled yellow school bus was hauled to the parking lot outside the gymnasium at Baker High School.

This is the short bus that carried 14 students, members of Baker’s FFA team, in Redmond for the state convention on March 22.

It’s the bus they were riding in when a Culver woman failed to stop at a stop sign and crashed into the front passenger side.

Several students were hurt. Four were treated at a hospital.

The woman, Katrina Nicole Dacus, 34, of Culver, is charged with driving under the influence of intoxicants and with 15 counts of recklessly endangering another person (the students and driver Bibiana Gifft, the FFA adviser), eight counts of fourth-degree assault, and one count each of reckless driving and second-degree criminal mischief, the latter based on damage to the bus.

The damaged bus served as the visual emphasis for a presentation that Greg Baxter, Baker County district attorney, and Baker City Police Chief Ty Duby gave to senior government classes about the dangers of driving while intoxicated.

Gifft also spoke to students before they went outside to see the results, in twisted steel, of a terrible decision.

There is, of course, no foolproof deterrent to drunken driving.

But the sight of a smashed bus that carried their classmates offers a dramatic, and disturbing, visual element to the valuable message Baxter, Duby and Gifft gave to students.