Over two dozen big yellow school buses caught fire in a storage and maintenance facility in Puyallup, Washington, leaving many of the kid-haulers looking like nothing more than thin, hollowed-out metal cages.
Coincidentally, thin, hallowed-out metal cages are also considered traditional and appropriate child containment devices in Puyallup, Washington.
Komo News says police don’t know how the fire started, only that it was enormous, which is excellent policing. The fire was big enough to necessitate an evacuation of residents in nearby neighborhoods, and big enough to require a shelter in a local church.
The news site puts the total number of damaged buses at 26, and says locals heard a bunch of explosions, most likely—I assume— from exploding bus tires and erupting fuel tanks.
Here’s another angle of the blaze:
The good news is that all 70 people who were at the bus yard when the fire broke out are uninjured. The bad news—for the kids trying to get out of school—is that other school districts are lending Puyallup some rigs so the currently bus-deprived school district can still get its students to class when they start September 6th.
So if this turns out to have been some kid’s “genius” master plan to never have to go to school ever again, it hasn’t worked. You would have been better off trying to fool the principal into thinking it was snowing.