Texas prison bus hit guardrail laying in road before deadly crash: NTSB

By Jon Herskovitz AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - A Texas prison bus that crashed this month into a freight train, killing eight inmates and two guards, hit a damaged guardrail left on an icy highway from previous accidents before it skidded off the road, an accident report said on Thursday. The bus hit the guardrail, veered to the left, traveled across an earthen median and became airborne when it went down an embankment. It struck the base of the embankment and then hit the moving freight train, the preliminary report from the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board said. The Texas Department of Public Safety had said the accident, which took place near the west Texas city of Odessa on Jan. 14, appeared to be weather related. The NTSB report said three crashes attributed to icy roads took place that day and the damaged guardrail was about two feet into the travel lane. The bus was traveling from Abilene to El Paso with 12 inmates and three corrections officers aboard. It was transporting offenders from the Middleton Unit in Abilene, which houses male offenders and is not a high-security facility. The five people injured in the crash, four inmates and a corrections officer, were treated at regional hospitals and released. Three of the inmates are receiving further treatment at prison infirmaries and another is being treated at a prison hospital, prison officials said. (Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Lisa Maria Garza in Dallas; Editing by Eric Beech)