School bus fire 911 calls: ‘There are flames shooting all over the place’

Rolling flames and a plume of smoke coming from a bus carrying Madison Schools students Tuesday afternoon sent calls to Butler County dispatchers.

“We have got a bus that they say is on fire out on Middletown-Germantown Road,” Larry Osborne of the Madison Schools transportation department told 911 operators in a call placed at 3 p.m. “The bus overheated and the driver just called in and said it has caught on fire around the engine.”

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Osborne told the dispatcher that the students who were on the bus had been moved to another bus “out of the way.”

A man also called at about the same time and told dispatchers, “There is a school bus on fire, like fully engulfed in flames on Middletown-Germantown Road. There are flames shooting all over the place.”

No Madison Schools students were injured when the school bus caught fire in the 7000 block of Middletown-Germantown Road, according to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office.

All of the students were evacuated safely off the bus, which suffered major damage.

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Madison Schools Superintendent Lisa Tuttle-Huff said the district is working with Petermann, the transportation service, to investigate the incident.