A 27-year-old teacher died when she fell from a bus found to have an “intermittent fault” with its emergency exit locking system and was hit by a passing van, an inquest has heard.
Amanda Kinsella, from Bennekerry, Co Carlow, was home on holidays from Bahrain in the Middle East to attend a friend’s wedding in Co Donegal on August 12th, 2021.
The wedding party was travelling by bus from Donegal town to Strabane to continue the celebrations on Friday, August 13th, when the incident occurred.
Members of the wedding party who were on board, including the bride, gave evidence at the inquest in Dublin District Coroner’s Court on Thursday. The court heard more than 30 people were on the bus at the time.
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As the 53-seater coach passed through the Barnesmore Gap at about 3.45pm, Kinsella was walking towards the rear of the bus when she “lost her balance and fell down the emergency exit”. The inquest heard that this happened while the bus turned a left-hand bend, without excessive speed.
Witnesses said they saw their friend fall down “four steep steps” and against the emergency door. Several members tried to help pull Kinsella back but the exit door opened from the force of her body and she quickly fell on to the road.
An approaching van “tried to take evasive action but had no time” to react to the sudden event, and hit her.
Forensic collision investigator Sgt Eoin Ó’ Connor said in evidence “if there was an impact between the van and the woman it would have been glancing” as there were no visible impact marks on the vehicle.
Kinsella suffered serious injuries from the fall and was airlifted to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin, where she died later that evening. A postmortem found the cause of death to be multiple traumatic injuries.
Coroner Dr Cróna Gallagher told the jury that blood tests showed “around one unit of alcohol in her system,” which she said was below the standard blood alcohol limit for drivers and “certainly not a level that would be associated with any impairment”.
Dr Gallagher described Kinsella’s fall and resulting death as a “very sudden and tragic incident”.
Public-service vehicle inspector Garda Damien Mulkearns conducted a post-incident investigation of the emergency door’s lock mechanism.
He tested the door lock by exerting force using his shoulder, to mimic what would have been applied by Kinsella’s fall. This test found that “on occasion” the lock disengaged and the door opened.
During his investigation, he identified an “intermittent fault” with the lock’s internal component which he said was “very rare”.
The inquest heard that there was some “wear and tear but no defect with the lock” itself, and the fault could not have been identified by the bus driver in routine checks, which had occurred in advance of this journey, nor by annual vehicle inspections.
A jury of 11 people returned an accidental verdict, recommending that the service life around locking mechanisms be considered by legislators “possibly leading to mandatory replacement after a specified number of years”.
