God may not have intended for a bus carrying youth and chaperones from First Baptist Church, Shreveport, La., to flip July 12, but He definitely intended for help to be right behind them.
At least that’s what a number of accident victims are saying after the Alabama Army National Guard’s 2101st Transportation Co. from Aliceville happened to be traveling on the road near them when the bus flipped several times near the Mississippi-Alabama line.
The Guard unit was returning from — believe it or not — a training session to prepare it to deal with rollover accidents, according to television station KTAL in Shreveport.
The group of 17 teenagers and six adults from First, Shreveport, was headed to a Passport camp in Atlanta when a blowout caused the driver to lose control. Brandon Ugarte, 14, was killed and others were injured when the bus flipped three times before landing on its side.
“We got up there and saw we had kids strung out everywhere,” said Sgt. Brian Pearson, who is Aliceville’s assistant fire chief, according to The Birmingham News. “Then we started getting the kids out of the bus, and then we heard a young lady up under the bus yelling for help.”
Alabama guardsmen lifted the bus off the ground to remove two victims trapped underneath.
Unit members trained in triage immediately started treating the most seriously injured until emergency crews arrived. For about 15 minutes, the guardsmen made splints from limbs, clothes and towels, according to the News.
“There are kids and adults who are alive today” becasuse of the guardsmen’s response, said Greg Hunt, senior pastor of First, Shreveport. “Every story for people of faith has these subplots where God sends His angels.”
Victims were taken to three hospitals in the Meridian, Miss., area and the University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) in Jackson.
After the accident, parents and church members rushed to Mississippi, where members of two Meridian congregations — First Baptist Church and Fifteenth Avenue Baptist Church — met them to help sort out where their loved ones had been sent.
Luggage and other items recovered from the crash site were taken to Fifteenth Avenue Baptist, where family members could pick them up. Hunt said support for his congregation was flooding in from all over the world.
Several prayer groups cropped up on social networking sites, and by the morning of July 13, one Facebook group had more than 1,200 members and nearly 100 wall postings.
Hunt said doctors at UMMC were still waiting for brain swelling to go down before they could determine the extent of trauma to Maggie Lee Henson, daughter of the church’s associate pastor for emerging ministries, and how she might respond to treatment.
“She’s the one we are most in need of prayer for,” Hunt said July 14 from the hospital.
He said doctors had gotten her brain pressure under control and were monitoring her condition.
Henson, a seventh-grader at First Baptist Church School, was one of the passengers ejected from and trapped under the bus.
Of those injured in the wreck, six remained hospitalized July 17. (ABP, TAB)
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