The story you linked to says no such thing. It says that the driver won’t face criminal charges. My guess is that he is gonna be in civil court getting his ass sued off for years to come, unless the many plaintiffs find deeper pockets (his employer?) or it’s really clear he’s been wrung dry of any assets. The story says he pulled onto the tracks after the warning lights were already flashing, he’s gonna be toast.
Maybe you saw it elsewhere, but the linked story doesn’t say anything about Union Pacific not being notified either.
How do you have a parade without a permit? It’s not like those things spontaneously happen and hoards of people just miraculously appear there when they do. The city has to be aware and there’s got to be advertising and planning too. Since that’s the case, if there’s no permit, why in the hell didn’t they stop it from proceeding and make sure the organizers got one and had everything right?
You really think they might have told the truck driver “there won’t be any trains today,” and then when he saw the active crossing signals he thought to himself “they told me there wouldn’t be any trains today, therefore that can’t possibly mean a train is coming, therefore it is safe to cross these tracks”?
Even if you believe that’s what happened, do you really feel that that was a sound decision on the part of the truck driver?
Bottom line, it doesn’t matter what they did or did not tell the truck driver: you are not supposed to cross train tracks when the signals are active.
As Boyo Jim says, even though there will be no criminal charges, there will be an orgy of civil suits.
The Kansas City St Patrick’s Day parade started off as a radio show host putting out a call on the air for people to show up and have a parade. It’s official now (permits and everything), but while the organizers presumably planned and maybe advertised it, the city didn’t necessarily know it was happening.
And once it was going, there aren’t a lot of cities that are going to prevent a bunch of disabled veterans from driving down a street. Plus, unless they wanted official permission to not stop at intersections or something (or there was a marching band), a parade is nothing much more than a group of vehicles all driving in the same direction at the same time - not something that necessarily needs a permit.
I guess I figured that any city would want to prevent disruption and traffic congestion that they didn’t supervise by just allowing a rogue parade to happen. I’ve lived in some tiny, backwater towns and even they would not be okay with that. It’s one thing to make a call for something to occur and another to turn a blind eye to any problems it might instigate (no matter how small) and just let everyone go ahead with their plans unfettered. Very bizarre to me.
Some parade organizers don’t know, or don’t care, that parades need permits. I knew of a group of people who’d have parades on various religious holidays, and while they didn’t march up and down any major streets, they always marched down my street…and made a horrible racket for quite a period of time, too. I finally called the cops, asked if they had a permit to do this, and jumped through some hoops…but it turns out that they didn’t have a permit, didn’t think that they had to get a permit (because it was free expression of religion) and got royally pissed off when they were told that no, they actually CAN’T have parades whenever and wherever they want to.
You can have a parade without actually calling it a parade. I don’t recall the terminology we used when planning our soldier’s Welcome Home celebration but if we used the word “parade”, we would have had to go through bureaucratic hell. As it was, no permit was needed. We advertised on the radio stations and people came out in droves. (This was before the war was “old news”) Granted, we didn’t have open floats with crippled veterans but the necessity of a permit would likely have more to do with the size of the municipality than anything else.
No, I didn’t say that I thought they told him there would be no trains. I said that I don’t think they told the truck drivers that they didn’t have official permission to be doing what they were doing.
Trying to cross the tracks like he did was 10 different kinds of bad idea. He had no business being where he was even if he hadn’t been responsible for the lives of his passengers. The mess that lead up to the accident was the fault of the people who flung this thing together without getting everything cleared first. The accident itself was entirely the driver’s fault.
I’ve dug through a crapload of articles and can’t find the one with Union Pacific’s statement about not being notified of an event crossing their tracks.
It’s after 3 and I’m hald asleep. I do more digging during the day and get back to this when I’m awake.