/ Hurricane Rita

He says it applied only to expired registration, not safety standards

01:59 PM EDT on Monday, September 26, 2005

By SCOTT FARWELL / The Dallas Morning News

Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Sunday defended his decision to sign a waiver allowing a bus with an expired registration to transport elderly residents fleeing Hurricane Rita from the Houston area to Dallas.

Twenty-four people died early Friday near Wilmer when a fire spread from the bus's brakes into the cabin, where it ignited several oxygen tanks. It was the worst bus accident in Texas since 1952.

Sunday morning on NBC's Meet the Press and later on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer, Mr. Perry said the exceptions he granted for motor carriers did not put people in danger.

Tim Russert, host of Meet The Press, cited a Dallas Morning News story that revealed the doomed bus's registration expired in July.

"You signed a waiver to allow buses like that to go back on the road for the evacuation. Any regrets?" Mr. Russert asked.

"Well, we didn't sign any waivers to allow for any safety standards to be overseen, so the fact of the matter is we were trying to get as many people out of harm's way as we could," Mr. Perry responded. "And that type of registration didn't have anything to do with the safety standards that are required. So if we had to all do it again, [we'd] probably do the same thing because it's important to get people out of harm's way."

On Late Edition, Mr. Perry was asked a similar question about the bus waiver.

"We were very clear: This was to get as many vehicles on the road, to get people out of harm's way," the governor said. "But the safety requirements were absolutely not waived. So the answer to that is no. We needed to get people moved, and we did an extraordinary job of moving 2.5 [million], 3 million people over a 36-hour period of time out of a massive storm."

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board continued to analyze the charred remains of the bus Sunday morning at a Dallas County maintenance yard, where it was transported after the accident on Interstate 45.

The bodies of victims in the crash were so badly burned that Dr. Jeffrey Barnard, Dallas County's chief medical examiner, said it could take weeks to identify them.

E-mail sfarwell@dallasnews.com