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Groton Daily Independent
Friday, May 17, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 3088 ~ 36 of 55
scene. The other buses made it to the site but returned to the school about 50 miles (80 kilometers) away. Some of the children were inside the bus and some were outside when first responders arrived, said
Jeff Paul, director of the Morris County Office of Emergency Management.
“We had patients laying all over the median and on the interstate,” Paul said. “There were all kinds of
injuries, every injury type you could expect in a crash of this magnitude.”
Thuy Nguyen, a nurse from Paramus, said she rushed to the school, where her son was taking a test
after hearing the news.
“My heart just dropped. You hear the name of the school ... ,” she said before trailing off.
Robinson said the district was cancelling school trips for the rest of the year.
Mendez Trucking has about 40 drivers and trucks, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admin-
istration. Its trucks had been in seven crashes, none fatal, during the last two years before Thursday’s crash, the FMCSA says. Messages left with the company weren’t returned.
Mendez has a higher than average vehicle out-of-service rate, which means inspections found violations that had to be corrected before the vehicles could be returned to service. Mendez’s rate was 37.9 percent, according to the FMCSA, while the national average is 20.7 percent.
A Mendez-owned dump truck driven by a driver police say had a suspended license struck and killed a French fashion stylist in New York in January 2011, according to court records.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 118 people on school buses were killed in crashes from 2007 to 2016, the last year for which data is available. Of those killed, 68 were passen- gers, including 58 school-age children, and 50 were drivers. School bus crashes killed 902 people in other vehicles over that span.
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Porter reported from Morristown, and Sisak reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press writers Shawn Marsh in Trenton, Mike Catalini in Paramus and Christina Paciolla, Jeff McMillan, Alexandra Villarreal and Claudia Lauer in Philadelphia contributed to this report as did investigative researcher Randy Herschaft in New York.
Rhino in San Diego pregnant, could help save subspecies By JULIE WATSON, Associated Press
SAN DIEGO (AP) — A southern white rhino has become pregnant through artificial insemination at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park — giving hope for efforts to save a subspecies of one of the world’s most rec- ognizable animals, researchers announced Thursday.
Scientists will be watching closely to see if the rhino named Victoria can carry her calf to term over 16 to 18 months of gestation.
If she does, researchers hope someday she could serve as a surrogate mother and could give birth to the related northern white rhino, whose population is down to two females after decades of decimation by poachers. The mother and daughter northern white rhinos that live in a Kenya wildlife preserve are not capable of bearing calves.
The last northern white male rhino, named Sudan, was euthanized in March at the Kenya preserve be- cause of ailing health related to his old age.
Victoria is the first to become pregnant of six female southern white rhinos the San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research is testing to determine if they are fit to be surrogate mothers. If they pass the testing, they could carry northern white rhino embryos sometime within the next decade as scientists work to re-create northern white rhino embryos.
There are no northern white rhino eggs so creating an embryo would require using genetic technology.
The San Diego Zoo Institute for Conservation Research has the cell lines of 12 different northern white rhinos stored in freezing temperatures at its “Frozen Zoo.”
Scientists hope to use frozen skin cells from the dead northern white rhinos to transform them into stem cells and eventually sperm and eggs. Then the scientists would use in vitro fertilization to create embryos