On a dark, rainy afternoon Tuesday, bus driver Sandy Jett hadn’t expected anything out of the ordinary as she navigated through the side streets of a quiet Ellet community with eight students from Springfield Local School District aboard.
As she turned from North Columbine Avenue onto Mogadore Road, an ominous black cloud suddenly appeared. On her left side, about 1,000 feet ahead, she saw a building engulfed in a raging “red ball of fire with blue flames.”
She knew something had gone horribly wrong when she saw a man desperately fleeing a fallen power line on Mogadore Road.
“What caught my attention and scared me was when I seen something fall right in front of me,” Jett recalled. “It was a power line that fell. Sparks flew and I’m thinking, ‘Okay … what’s causing these power lines to do this and how many more are going to fall and how close are they going to get?’
“By then it was like the cloud had whooshed down and went up. Then, it whooshed down and smoke was coming toward us, so then I threw [the bus] in reverse.”
Jett, assigned to a still-unfamiliar route only two weeks ago, took evasive action to shield the junior and high school students on board from a potentially dangerous situation.
It wasn’t until she radioed a dispatcher seeking directions for a safer route toward her next assignment that Jett was informed just how close she and the students came to a private charter plane that had crashed into an Akron apartment, killing all nine passengers.
Jett, 52, had dropped off the majority of her students when they came across the harrowing scene.
One of the students onboard, Monty Goins, a 10th-grader whom she said always helps her out, ran to the back of the bus and hung his head out the window to peer through the smoke and offer her directions as she backed up.
“I got backed up to the corner of Forest Park and Mogadore Road and cars had caught up with me from behind,” she said. “A man with a white beard, white hair and a red coat appeared in my mirror, and started stopping cars and had them back up, then he directed me backward until there was enough room for me to turn around and go another way.”
As she retold her story at the school’s bus garage, the woman who trained her on bus safety, Melinda Hamilton, couldn’t resist the obvious.
“So it was a good thing he had a red coat on so you could see him. He really was Santa Claus that day,” said Hamilton, the safety coordinator for the schools.
Jett, who has been a bus driver for three years, said dispatcher Cathy Turner helped her maneuver out of the area because the power was out and none of the traffic signals was working. Turner told her about the plane crash, reassigned nearby buses to her elementary school route and helped her find alternate roads to the homes of the eight students onboard.
Jett said she doesn’t recall her or the students saying much as she dropped them off at their homes.
“Everyone was quiet, stunned I guess, but then again we didn’t know what had happened,” Jett said. “To us it was a house on fire. We got away from it and the kids were home safe.
“I know it hit me and I think it hit them that evening when they saw on the news what had happened — that’s when we realized how close we really were.”
Her supervisor commended her on turning the bus around and shielding the students from seeing the accident.
“Sandy kept the kids on the bus very calm through the incident. They showed no signs of being scared,” said Dustin Boswell, the school’s business manager, who oversees transportation.
A day after the disastrous crash, Jett’s student helper, Monty, reminded her how terribly close they all came to witnessing the fatal plane crash.
“We both knew — there was a sigh of relief,” a trembling Jett recalled with tears streaming down her face. “Right now I’m shaking and when I’m home I’m crying. But when I’m on my bus, it’s the only time that I’m OK.
“When you concentrate on what you’re doing you don’t have time to think. It was like an out-of-body experience. It all happened so fast. It was like boom, boom, boom. It was like my mind slowed down.”
Jett said she never saw the plane that had carried mostly executives of a South Florida real estate company.
Still, the frightening ball of fire, the black smoke and the scattered sparks from power lines remain vivid in her mind.
Springfield Local Schools Superintendent Charles Sincere said the school board will recognize the bus driver and dispatcher at its meeting Tuesday for their quick reaction and how they handled the situation.
“Everybody keeps saying I’m a hero,” Jett said. “No, I did what anybody would have done and that’s to get out of there. I acted on fear.”
Marilyn Miller can be reached at 330-996-3098 or mmiller@thebeaconjournal.com.