Smoke rose from her school bus. She saved students before the fire started.

Milwaukee school bus driver saved students before fire erupted - The Washington Post

Imunek Williams was waiting for a red light to change when she started smelling smoke Wednesday. The bus driver was about a mile from the Milwaukee charter school where she had been dropping off students every morning throughout the school year.

Instead of finishing the short drive, Williams pulled onto a curb.

“Grab your stuff, and let’s get off,” Williams recalled telling 37 students.

In the next minute, students from the K-12 school ran down the aisle and exited the front door. Moments after confirming the bus was empty, Williams stepped onto the sidewalk and watched the heater erupt in flames that spread throughout the bus.

Williams’s quick decision might have saved her life — and the lives of everyone else on the bus, including her baby, who is due in August.

“I was sitting right there, and I mean, that could’ve been me,” Williams, 24, told The Washington Post. “I could’ve been driving to school even longer; I could’ve caught fire or something. I just get real shocked, especially after seeing the damages to the bus.”

Williams enjoys driving on road trips and taking care of children, so she began operating buses for the Milwaukee Academy of Science last July. She underwent training to handle fires, but she didn’t think she would ever use those lessons.

When the school year began last fall, she woke up around 5 a.m. every weekday to make a short drive to a bus terminal and start her route. Students rarely spoke in the morning, she learned, but she looked forward to seeing them animated when she picked them up after school.

Wednesday was the third-to-last day of the school year, and she had picked up her students on route 7-21 when she began smelling smoke around 7:50 a.m. Students smelled it, too, and thought someone was smoking a cigarette.

More smoke began ascending from a heater, and Williams was so nauseous she couldn’t find her dispatch radio to alert other bus drivers. Instead, she pulled over and told her students to evacuate through the front door. She worried using the back door would take too long.

Some children didn’t understand the danger, so Williams told them to hurry. After about a minute, the bus was empty and the fire began.

“I’m older than everybody, and everybody is kind of under my care,” Williams said. “So I just thought to stay calm and not overreact because I didn’t want them to react in a way that would have caused us to take longer to get off the bus.”

Sophomore Aedyn Leggett thought at first there might’ve been a problem with the engine, but he was terrified when he watched flames emerge. The fire destroyed the windows and front door.

“Imagine if the bus driver didn’t smell anything or she didn’t stop, and it just goes on fire and we’re all in it,” said Leggett, 15. “I’m lucky to have that bus driver.”

Williams called emergency services and her colleagues before leading the students to a street corner farther from the fire. About four minutes later, firefighters arrived and extinguished the flames. Another school bus took the students to school, and a friend drove Williams to Aurora Health Care.

Doctors checked her and the baby’s health through monitors but found they were healthy. Williams filled out an incident report for the police but was given the rest of the day off.

The Milwaukee Police Department said in a statement to TMJ4 on Wednesday that nobody was injured.

“The cause of the fire is under investigation; however, does not appear to be suspicious at this time,” the statement said.

The next morning, Williams repeated her daily routine and drove a new school bus to pick up students. Most were surprised to see her, she said, and one first-grader said she thought Williams had “burnt up.”

“If the school bus doesn’t come, they don’t have a way to get to school,” Williams said. “I’m able to actually pick them up and give them a ride to school and be there for them every day.”