BROWARD COUNTY, Fla. – A South Florida middle school student discussed the experience of seeing the bus she’d just been traveling on going up in flames on the side of the highway.
“I never thought that would happen,” said Miabella Bernard. “Thank God I got home.”
The 13-year-old Seminole Middle School student was one of 47 kids on the charter bus, along with four chaperones and the driver.
The group was headed back to Plantation on the Turnpike after a trip to SeaWorld in Orlando.
“The tire popped, I guess,” Bernard said. “Something about the brakes, and caught on fire.”
Port St. Lucie firefighters posted photos on social media of the bus pulled over, just north of the Port St. Lucie rest stop, charred.
“She called me and said ‘the bus is on fire,’ and I really thought it was a joke,” said Miabella’s mother, Danielle Bernard.
The school district says everyone was off the bus before the fire started.
Bernard and her classmates waited at the nearby rest stop for another bus to get them back to the school.
“It could have been so much worse, so much worse,” said Danielle Bernard. “When you sign those forms, you don’t think anything of it. You just assume they’re going to get your kid back to you in one piece. Thank God it happened this time.”