“We should look out for others” says Morgan

An Athlone man who had a lucky escape when a bus on which he was a passenger last week burst into flames has some sage words of advice after his frightening experience and says we should “look out for others.”

Morgan Fagg, who lives and works in the Spanish capital, Madrid, was a passenger on an Express bus from Pozuelo to Madrid on Friday last when a car slowed down alongside the bus and started beeping its horn aggressively.

“Horns are over-used every day of the week and I ignored the driver’s warning at first as just being another aggressive driver on the road,” says Morgan. “There are so many terrible drivers on the road and many of them are completely distracted all the time by their Smartphones.”

He points out that he has even seen bus drivers on their phones “chatting away as they drive” but luckily, for him and the other passengers travelling on the Express bus on Friday last “our driver was on the ball, he wasn’t reading a book, or taking a look at his phone, so he was able to heed the beeping of the horn by the car driver alongside the bus.”

Another stroke of luck for Morgan Fagg was the fact the he hadn’t been able to find his headphones for a couple of days, so he was fully alert to the unfolding emergency situation on board the bus.

However, a female passenger on the bus who was wearing headphones was “completely unaware of any danger” as she looked at her phone with her head down. “At this stage the bus driver had pulled over and jumped out of his glazed cabin and was speaking to passengers so I knew something was wrong, and then I looked at the back of the bus and I could see smoke,” recalls Morgan.

When he noticed the smoke, Morgan Fagg started shouting to warn other passengers to get off the bus. “”The girl clearly didn’t hear me as I made my way towards her, so I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her out of her seat and guided her off the bus, confident that I was the last person to exit the bus.”

Shortly afterwards, the bus exploded into flames and it took less than five minutes for the whole vehicle to become an inferno. “The fire completely engulfed the bus and blew out all the windows,” he says.

While it was a very frightening experience for Morgan, he says it was very fortunate that the incident occurred on an afternoon bus as there were only a few passengers onboard. “The same bus, in the morning, is wedged full and I have often counted as many as 25 people packed into the aisles despite all the Coronavirus signage saying that we should ‘mentega la distancia.’”

The young Athlone man has always been acutely conscious of the need for all forms of public transport to carry emergency hammers, and unfortunately he has noticed that these vital safety features are missing from many buses and trains.

“I once walked the length of a train and saw that all the red emergency hammers were missing and had not been replaced,” he says, “so I feel it would be worth checking emergency hammers on all public transport even if accidents like the one on our bus last week are rare, because there could have been fatalities if the bus was full and if the driver hadn’t warned us in time to get off .”

“As I always say, we should look out for others, and you never know when somebody might really appreciate you rudely beeping your horn at them,” he says.