Ready for drill, then the real thing came

The morning was supposed to be about pretend emergencies. It suddenly turned very real for members of the Albertville Volunteer Fire Department when, minutes before they were to leave for a training exercise early Saturday morning, their pagers beeped with an alert: "a bus on its side."

The crash on Interstate 94 was just a few hundred yards from the fire station.

Fire Chief Tate Mills and six others piled into the station's No. 1 engine, dashed over a freeway overpass and down an entrance ramp to the overturned bus, their headlights illuminating a scene that Mills described as "mass confusion" in the early morning dark.

The tour bus had pitched onto its side and plowed down a grassy embankment, stopping 30 feet from a barbed-wire fence. Young kids, students on a band trip, had freed themselves and now huddled in groups. Some of them couldn't walk. The bus held four more students, all of them trapped. One of them, a girl, was already dead.

For the next two hours, maybe more, the rescuers struggled to right the bus without crushing the trapped students, Mills said.

Two ambulances arrived immediately, but Mills called for three more. Two helicopters landed on the freeway, which by now had been blocked to traffic.

Firefighters, including some from Elk River, Monticello and St. Michael, broke out windows and scraped into the frozen ground to get under the bus, installing lumber where they could to prop it up. Industrial air bags inserted under the bus were slowly inflated.

"The frame would flex a little bit, so we would lift two or three inches at a time, assess, do it again," Mills said. The painstaking progress eventually freed a student trapped near the back of the bus; the rescuers then switched tactics to raise the front.

The full horror of the crash had fallen mostly on a pair of conscious students caught near the girl who died. "They were trapped right on top of her," Mills said. Firefighters used cables to pull the bus toward the freeway, raising it until the students were freed.

Two of the students pulled from under the bus were taken away by helicopters and were among the most seriously injured.

The firefighters nearly witnessed the crash because they were assembled at the fire hall and about to leave on the training exercise. They would have gone on the freeway overpass right where the crash occurred, Mills said.

"We were just ready to jump in the trucks and go when our pagers went off," he said.

Matt McKinney • 612-673-7329