Four CVSD electric buses catch fire
The cause of the fire at Allen Brook School is still being investigated but school to reopen on Monday. The fire was the latest in a string of problems for the electric bus initiative.
Record Staff Report
Back in January, CVSD chief operating officer Gary Marckres admitted to the school board that the district’s experiment with leasing six electric buses, while environmentally friendly, “hasn’t gone that terrific. The buses haven’t been reliable” explaining that cold weather was preventing charging. “The bottom line is that they haven’t been available every day.”
UPDATE: Now four of them will never be available.
Late Wednesday night four of the six electric buses leased from Highland Electric Company and parked at Allen Brook School in Williston caught fire and were destroyed. The district closed Allen Brook for two days for clean-up and Williston Central for one day because of disruption of the bus routes. Both will be open Monday.
The district said it will not use the two undamaged electric buses until it knows what caused the others to catch fire. “We need some answers, and our most important job is to make sure our students are safe,” Bunting said.
The cause of the fire is still being investigated by a variety of agencies including Vermont State Police, Highland Electric and the bus manufacturer, Thomas Built Buses. The Williston Fire Department and CVSD said the fire did not seem of suspicious origin; the buses were docked at their charging stations at the time of the fire and investigators are looking at the elements of the school bus systems, including the chargers, batteries and electrical ports.
The district estimated the loss at $2 million and was trying to determine how much of that expense will fall to CVSD.
“Our hope is that we’re going to be able to recoup these expenses, of course, through insurance and other means,” CVSD Superintendent Adam Bunting told vtdigger.org. “But it’s probably going to take some time to figure that out.”
The buses have had their problems.
At the January board meeting Marckres said that “while not disparaging Highland Electric or the manufacturer,” the extreme cold was causing problems with the buses’ batteries and recharging system. He said Highland Electric and the district had been trying to resolve the problems.
The fire in the Allen Brook School parking lot was discovered by custodians at about 10 p.m. Wednesday, and they immediately called 911. Upon arrival, fire crews found the four buses engulfed in flames and used a deck gun and two hand lines to extinguish the fire. No injuries were reported.
The four destroyed buses were among 60 school buses in the district’s fleet. On March 3, voters approved a $250,000 bond to purchase two new buses and two new vans.