Twelve students and two adults suffered non-life-threatening injuries in a school bus crash in Alamance County, North Carolina on Feb. 16.

The school bus crash happened in Snow Camp, North Carolina on Beale Road, according to the North Carolina Highway Patrol.

According to crash investigators, the bus was going north when a passenger car did not yield right of way and pulled into the path of the bus. The bus ran off the side of the road and stopped in a grove of trees.

The bus was carrying 41 students from a local middle and high school. Their injuries consisted of sprained arms, knees, bumps, bruises and a possible broken leg.

The school bus driver and the car driver also suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Our View

Our personal injury attorneys are relieved that no one suffered serious injuries in this school bus accident. Fortunately, school bus accidents with fatalities are relatively rare: From 2004-2013, there were 340,039 fatal motor vehicle accidents in the US, and only 1214 involved school transportation vehicles.  It should be noted however that school buses lack seatbelts, so non-life-threatening injuries are quite common in bus crashes. 

Even when there are no fatalities, however, personal injuries resulting from car and bus crashes can result in consider pain and suffering for victims. They may lose time from work and have difficulty caring for their families and taking part in their favorite hobbies and activities.

Our Virginia personal injury attorneys represented a client who suffered serious injuries in Virginia Beach when a turning driver failed to yield right of way. A violent wreck occurred, and our client suffered major orthopedic injuries. The EMTs had to remove him from the car given the serious nature of the crash injuries.

He had to have several surgeries to repair a displaced closed intraarticular right calcaneus fracture, a left supracondylar femur fracture, a left open ankle fracture bimalleolar and other related orthopedic care. He was in the hospital for weeks and also have to have several foot and ankle surgeries that included putting a plate in his left leg.

Our Virginia personal injury attorneys hired a professional to perform a vocational assessment, which showed how much he would have made before the accident, and how many years he could have likely worked. For this Virginia car accident case, our client had lost a wage earning capacity of $612,000.

We also calculated that his future lost wages would be $830,000. In the end, we settled this serious car accident personal injury case for $1 million.