Eastern Connecticut |
Seventy-four-year-old Shin-Chia Tan doesn't remember hearing anyone scream when the packed bus heading to Mohegan Sun hit a guardrail and toppled onto a snowy Interstate 95 in February.
As the sound of blaring horns and squealing tires filled the air, he and the 54 others on the bus seemed to lose their voices, perhaps aware of how little control they had over the situation. Tan, a Flushing, N.Y., resident originally from Taiwan, was just one of at least 36 passengers injured Feb. 8 when the Dahlia Group Inc. bus flipped over in Madison. At least six of them were in critical condition for a period of time. A state police report confirms Tan's version of the story: Keyi Zhang, the 63-year-old driver from Flushing, lost control while merging from the right to the left lane, closing I-95 north for 4½ hours. An investigation by The Day shows that while Dahlia Group and other bus lines serving casinos repeatedly are cited for unsafe driving, vehicle maintenance and other violations — some at a higher rate than others — most of them continue to operate. Dahlia Group and its drivers have been cited with 38 violations — ranging from driving too fast to drinking while driving — since February 2014, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. By the safety administration's standards, the 33 violations racked up by Dahlia's New York branch — it also has one in Boston — mean 83 percent of motor carriers in the same category have better on-road safety performance than it does. The safety administration calculates an unsafe driving measure based on the number and severity of violations, the number of vehicles and the miles traveled by each vehicle. By far, Dahlia has the worst rating of the buses that travel regularly to Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. Yet Dahlia continues to run as many as 14 buses between Mohegan Sun and Flushing each day, according to the website of VMC Travel Express, the agency that books buses including Dahlia. Mohegan Sun lists 20 bus companies and three booking agencies on its website for customers to use, under either "line runs" or "Asian line runs." Dahlia isn't listed, although VMC Travel Express is. Other agencies listed include I-Fun Entertainment and Oriental Travel LLC. The former books trips on buses owned by Cash World Tours Inc., whose rating with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is "conditional," which is similar to being on probation. The latter runs SOE Tour Inc. buses. On March 2, one of those buses burst into flames and filled the highway with thick black smoke while en route to Mohegan Sun from Boston. All 45 passengers escaped without injury. Read more at http://www.theday.com/local/20160326/13-casino-bus-not-always-bargain/1.
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ABOUTA selection of stories I wrote as a breaking news and police reporter for The Day in New London, Conn. Archives
July 2019
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