Beneath the Big Sandy

Show pity, Lord, O Lord forgive,

Prepare me, Lord, to die

Will the waters be chilly, will the waters

be chilly, Will the waters be chilly when I'm

called to die?

--Cumberland Mt. Folk Song

Chilly and swollen from melting snow were the waters of eastern Kentucky's Big Sandy River. In the evergreen-carpeted Cumberland foothills of Floyd County, where the Levisa Fork of the Big

Sandy bends and weaves and runs for a piece beside U.S. Highway 23, the muddy water was swirling, rapids-fast and more than 20 ft. deep, through channels where it normally meanders no more than chest-high on a tall man. There, last week, a loaded school bus caromed off the highway, down a soft, bank, and into the icy water. With it to death rode 26 Floyd County children and their driver, in the worst school-bus accident in U.S. history.

A Kiss Goodbye. The bright yellow bus, with 46 pupils aboard, was bound for the elementary and high schools in nearby Prestonsburg. There was nothing unusual about the morning beyond cloudy skies, or about the bus and its journey. At about 7 o'clock Driver Jack Derossett, 27, started his usual route through the 75-family coal-mining town of Cow Creek, picked up his regular riders on schedule. Seconds before he was due, for example, James Goble, 12, John, 11, and Anna Laura, 9, the three children of Cow Creek Storekeeper James B. Goble, scooped up their books, kissed their mother, hurried out the door to climb aboard.

One mile from Cow Creek, Driver Derossett eased down a slight incline beside the Big Sandy. Two hundred feet ahead, a wrecker was maneuvering across Highway 23 to pull a truck out of a ditch.

"I Knew in My Heart." For unaccountable reasons (so unaccountable that his friends suspect a heart attack), De-rossett did not slow down. Instead, the bus rammed the wrecker, knocked it 60 ft. The bus itself lurched, swayed, tipped for a moment at the top of the embankment, then slithered through a grove of willow trees into the river. It hung for agonizing minutes in 3 ft. of water--long enough and shallow enough for 13-year-old Bill Leedy to kick open the rear emergency door, push smaller children out, then escape himself. Other passengers frantically rolled down windows and crawled out. Altogether 20 children got free before Big Sandy's heavy current swept the bus like a little log into deeper water, and closed over the scream's of the children trapped inside. Among them: all three of Cow Creek's Gobies.

In coal-mining Floyd County, where sudden tragedy is familiar, word of the accident spread fast. Mountain men assembled to grapple for the sunken bus; Cow Creek residents begged rides or ran through the mud to the river to see which of their children would be coming home again. Mrs. Goble soon discovered that none of hers would, accepted the news with resignation. Said she: "I prayed that at least one might be saved, but I knew in my heart I had lost them all."

Fifty-three hours after the accident, the submerged bus was finally hooked 200 yds. from the point where it hit the water. Cables were lashed on by Navy frogmen: two tractors winched the tragic cargo ashore. As the first bodies were carried out, the Rev. Ivan Jones of West Prestonsburg's Assembly of God Church called for a moment of prayer. "Lord strengthen our hearts in this trying time."

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