At this point Dar got back in the bus, set the parking brake, and drove away from the campsite again. A convoy of CHP vehicles and private cars followed.

The bus surged slightly going uphill. Both Dar and his assistant manning the video camera commented on tape that they could smell the brakes burning. CHP vehicles trailing the bus reported over their radios that they could clearly see smoke coming from the rear wheels. The brake warning light came on. Dar paused briefly where the accident-bus driver had paused, pumped the brakes as she had, and then started down the long incline.

The brakes failed 1.3 miles down the steep canyon road. The automatic brakes deployed but then also failed due to overheating. The bus began to accelerate.

When the bus reached 46 miles per hour, Dar shifted from D-3 to D-2, slowing it, and then shifted to D-1, causing the bus to lurch but also to slow quickly. Still moving 11 miles per hour, he selected a sandy patch of hillside on the inside stretch of the next curve and nosed the bus into it, bringing it to a halt with only the smallest of bumps. A second later, the armada of CHP cruisers and School Board members’ cars converged on the bus. Dar got in one of the highway patrol cars and they drove down to the accident site.

“The driver left the campsite with her parking brake on, which meant that both emergency brakes were set, thus overheating the entire system for the first two miles and dropping the air pressure below thirty psi,” he said to the crowd gathered around the point where the bus had left the highway. “The automatic brakes deployed, but their efficiency was low because of the overheating. Still, that should have been enough to slow the bus to below twenty-eight miles per hour. It did in this reenactment.”