Tour Bus Crash Kills 9 in Oregon

The charter bus carrying about 40 people lost control around 10:30 a.m. on snow- and ice-covered lanes of Interstate 84 in a rural area of eastern Oregon, according to the Oregon State Police. The bus crashed near the start of a 7-mile section of road that winds down a hill.

The bus came to rest at the bottom of a snowy slope and landed upright, with little or no debris visible around the crash site.

More than a dozen rescue workers descended the hill and used ropes to help retrieve people from the wreckage in freezing weather. The bus driver was among the survivors, but had not yet spoken to police because of the severity of the injuries the driver had suffered.

Lt. Greg Hastings said the bus crashed along the west end of the Blue Mountains, and west of an area called Deadman Pass. The area is so dangerous the state transportation department published specific warnings for truck drivers, advising it had "some of the most changeable and severe weather conditions in the Northwest" and can lead to slick conditions and poor visibility.

St. Anthony Hospital in Pendleton treated 26 people from the accident, said hospital spokesman Larry Blanc. Five of those treated at St. Anthony were transported to other facilities.

I-84 is a major east-west highway through Oregon that follows the Columbia River Gorge.

Umatilla County Emergency Manager Jack Remillard said the bus was owned by Mi Joo travel in Vancouver, B.C., and state police said the bus was en route from Las Vegas to Vancouver.

A woman who answered the phone at a listing for the company confirmed with The Associated Press that it owned the bus and said it was on a tour of the Western U.S. She declined to give her name.

A bus safety website run by the U.S. Department of Transportation said Mi Joo Tour & Travel has six buses, none of which have been involved in any accidents in at least the past two years.

The bus crash was the second fatal accident on the same highway in Oregon on Sunday. A 69-year-old man died in a rollover accident about 30 miles west of the area where the bus crashed.

A spokesman for the American Bus Association said buses carry more than 700 million passengers a year in the United States.

"The industry as a whole is a very safe industry," said Dan Ronan of the Washington, D.C.,-based group. "There are only a handful of accidents every year. Comparatively speaking, we're the safest form of surface transportation."

The bus crash comes more than two months after another chartered tour bus in October veered off a highway in northern Arizona, killing the driver and injuring dozens of passengers who were mostly tourists from Asia and Europe. Authorities say the driver likely had a medical episode.

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Ask Science: Probes Will Crash Into the Moon’s Dark (Not Far) Side Today

NASA also announced it had named the impact sites after Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

The crashes into a lunar mountain brought the yearlong mission to map the Moon’s gravity field to an end. The twin spacecraft were running low on maneuvering fuel, and NASA wanted to make sure that they did not accidentally destroy a historical site like one of the Apollo landings — ­ unlikely, but possible.

NASA broadcast live commentary of the impacts on its Web site, but provided no live video showing the probes hitting the Moon.

In my article last week about the impending demise of Ebb and Flow, I noted, “Unfortunately, since the action will happen on the dark side of the Moon, there will be nothing for earthlings to see.”

About a gazillion people, including Robert Kirshner, a Harvard astronomy professor, wrote in to ask, “Didn’t you mean to write ‘far side’ and not ‘dark side’?”

The more annoyed wrote: “Dark Side of the Moon??? Come on now. You know that is not correct! You completely blew a potential teaching moment, to educate the public that the **FAR** side of the Moon is **NOT** dark! Instead you perpetuated yet another scientific misconception. No wonder we are facing a crisis in science literacy in the U.S. The New York Times can and should do better!”

Except I really meant, “dark side” ­ — the side of the Moon facing away from the Sun.

What was confusing to many was a remembered tidbit about the Moon, that there is always one face towards Earth, and the other always out of view, and they presumed that the crashes will be on the far side and therefore blocked from view.

If that were the case, “far side” would be correct.

During the news conference last week, Maria T. Zuber, the principal investigator, said the probes would be crashing into a “non-sunlit” part of the surface. I translated that into a more common word: dark.

Plus, it was a nice allusion to Pink Floyd.

But because there is a permanent near side and a permanent far side, many interpreted “dark side” as “permanently dark side.” As the readers pointed out, as the Moon rotates, the Sun rises over the entire surface during the course of a monthlong lunar day. That’s true. The crash sites, which are actually on the near side of the Moon, are not always dark, but what is relevant is that the crash sites were dark at 5:28 p.m on Monday. The crashes were not visible because the area was dark, not because they were out of the line of sight.

In a couple of weeks, it will come back into sunlight, and it’s at that point that NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will attempt to photograph the gouges left by the two Grail spacecraft.

This is easy to see if you sketch out three circles, for the Sun, Earth and Moon. Then it’s instantly clear that the dark side -- the side facing away from the Sun —­ is different from the far side, ­ the side facing away from the Earth.

Or just remember: Pink Floyd has nothing to do with Gary Larson.

Meanwhile, astronomers should come up with a term to describe the side of the Moon facing away from the sun. (Make your suggestions in the comments.)

A smaller number of readers wondered why the spacecraft will crash when the maneuvering fuel runs out. The Moon has no atmosphere and therefore there is no friction to slow them down. But the Moon’s gravity is uneven and the orbit is not perfectly circular. Without periodic course adjustments, it will become more chaotic and elliptical, and the ellipse will intersect with the surface of the Moon — i.e., crash.

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