A Pace bus ended up in the front yard of a Glenview home, after a village snow plow crashed into the bus on Feb. 8, 2013. (Credit: CBS)
GLENVIEW, Ill. (STMW) – Peter Garvey, his wife and their five boys were in deep slumber when they were awakened Friday morning in their Glenview home by a “big bang,” but it wasn’t startling enough to make them go and investigate.
“Two minutes later, police knock on our door and say, ‘You know you have a Pace bus in your yard?’ I’m like, ‘come on,’” Garvey, 41, recalled.
The police weren’t joking. A Village of Glenview Park District snow plow ran a stop sign about 6 a.m., hitting the bus and causing it to smash through Garvey’s 25-foot-high hedge, police said. The bus stopped about 10 feet short of his home at the corner of Spruce Street and Glenview Road.
“If it wasn’t for those bushes stopping it, that bus would have been right through my house,” said Garvey, who works as a trader in the city.
The bus driver and the only passenger on board were both hospitalized and treated for injuries that weren’t believed to be life-threatening, said Glenview Police Sgt. Dave Sostak. The snowplow driver was given a citation for failing to stop at a stop sign, Sostak said.
The snowplow driver lost control of his vehicle, and it ended up veering across the lawn of another nearby home — crashing into a basement window.
Home owner Sean Walsh was sleeping on the couch in his front room. He had a nasty cold, and had finally managed to fall asleep.
“The whole window was lit up and (the snowplow driver’s) horn was going,” said Walsh, 36, a union electrician.
As a crew boarded up his shattered basement window, Walsh managed to find humor in an accident that might have been far more serious.
“It’s hysterical,” Walsh said.
Garvey was a little less amused, as he surveyed the gaping hole in his hedge and the deep tire tracks in his yard. It’s time, he said, for village officials to put in a four-way stop at his intersection.
“We got lucky,” Garvey said. “We’ve been asking the village, telling them we need a stop sign there. … People come flying down Glenview Road.”
(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2013. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
