Quintin Watts was an ex-con down on his luck. Daniel Cobb, Watts' stepfather, hired him last week to drive one of four buses he owned and used to ferry Southeast Asian passengers, most of them seniors, to Indian gambling casinos.
California Highway Patrol investigators say Watts was either drunk or high on drugs Sunday night. Witnesses say he was driving erratically and that he may have fallen asleep at the wheel just before he drove into a ditch on a rural Colusa County road, killing eight people, including Cobb, the stepfather who had done him a favor. Most of the 35 survivors were injured, some critically.
The deadly accident offers a rare peek into a gambling subculture that thrives in our region. Thousands of older immigrants spend their Social Security checks at Indian gambling casinos. They are delivered to the casinos in charter buses, a lot of them owned by small private operators like Daniel Cobb. Are those buses safe? Are they driven by qualified drivers? Those are questions that need to be answered in the wake of this tragedy.
The California Highway Patrol is required to conduct terminal inspections of bus companies every 13 months where a sampling of buses are inspected along with company maintenance records and drivers' logs. Buses are supposed to be registered with the California Public Utility Commission. According to Cobb's business partner, the company had four buses, but CPUC officials say only one is currently registered with the state.
Drivers of these buses are required to have a Class B commercial license. According to the DMV, Watts had paid fines and cleared two speeding tickets and a citation for failure to wear a seat belt in 2005 and 2006. He had a valid commercial license. However, he did not have a special permit called an endorsement, so legally he was not authorized to operate the bus he was driving the night of the accident.
The investigation is continuing. It's too early to assign blame beyond the driver or to know what if any regulatory lapses may have contributed to this tragedy. But it is not too early for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to demand a full investigation by the PUC and the Highway Patrol.
And it certainly is not too early to urge Congress to do more to regulate motor coach safety. A simple safety measure like seat belts could have reduced the carnage in Colusa. The National Transportation Safety Board first recommended seat belts for inter-city buses in 1968, 40 years ago. Despite numerous deadly bus accidents since then, nothing has been done to move that recommendation into reality.
A bill introduced last year would have mandated seat belts, stronger windows and sturdier roofs on inter-city buses. It stalled in the Senate last month. Now is the time to bring it back to life.
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