Expressway Coach fire - Letterkenny

dublinman1990

An Expressway Coach owned by Bus Éireann has caught fire in Letterkenny Co. Donegal this evening.

Newstalk have reported that the coach was taking passengers on a service to Dublin.

Sparks were believed to have come from the rear of the coach which may have the main culprit in starting the blaze.

There are no injuries reported from both the passengers & the driver. The Fire service in Donegal had evacuated all passengers safely.

https://www.newstalk.com/news/coach-catches-fire-in-letterkenny-1416803#Echobox=1672957480

I hope all of those involved are safe and well this evening.

91wx763

And a driver died in a crash near Moate this week as well, RIP.

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/westmeath-bus-crash-moate-gardai-28881539

Vic_08

A passenger account from this link:

https://www.newstalk.com/news/smoke-started-to-appear-passenger-describes-moment-bus-eireann-coach-caught-fire-1416868

The incident in Meath on Wednesday has been reported elsewhere as a medical episode with the driver.

I'm sure those posters quick to point out the breakdowns suffered by Dublin Coach will be along shortly to give their opinion on this potentially life threatening episode from the state bus company.

It was very lucky there was so few passengers on board.

dublinman1990

I have to ask here what do Bus Éireann from here when a lot of these Irizar SE class coaches are currently in service with Expressway?

Are Bus Éireann going to do any inspections on these coaches reliability while they are currently in use within the fleet in the near future.

Would they be known to have defects within them when they're not checked properly for maintenance purposes; I am not too sure whether it would be wise to do some sort of inspection on them just in case something else in them goes wrong. These coaches have been operating in the Expressway fleet for 8 years which isn't known to be a very long period of time. You would very rarely hear of incidents of them going up in flames too often while they are out on their Expressway routes all around the country.

OTOH; if this incident in Letterkenny was just known to be an one off event for using that particular coach on the service to Dublin. I do wonder whether this incident should be treated as a isolated one as something faulty was showing up inside the engine while expressing no further concern to it's reliability concerns across the rest of it's fleet.

Vic_08

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120075485#Comment_120075485

The issues with Dublin Coach were the number and frequency of various and serious defects (including fires) not to mention convictions for multiple breaches of tacho regulations. It was exceptional not only by the numbers but in relation to the small fleet involved, a similar rate by BE would see dead buses littered across the country daily.

Buses/coaches do sometimes go on fire, it is a weakness of having a confined and heavily heat-shielded engine bay. A fuel leak or wiring fault that in other vehicles may not develop into a full-blown fire is subjected to much higher temperatures in a bus.

Most buses will come with or at least have the option to have a fire suppressant system for the engine bay, the effectiveness of these in quashing fires is not always great but they should increase the time available to evacuate safely. All BE vehicles have these systems installed.