{"id":18437,"date":"2012-12-03T15:39:16","date_gmt":"2012-12-03T20:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=18437"},"modified":"2012-12-03T15:39:16","modified_gmt":"2012-12-03T20:39:16","slug":"church-bus-crashes-catches-on-fire-on-interstate-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/?p=18437","title":{"rendered":"Church Bus Crashes, Catches On Fire On Interstate 4"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>BY IRIS B. HOLTON<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Sentinel City Editor<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>One of the buses belonging to an East Tampa church crashed into a wall and caught fire Monday morning. The accident took place after the driver apparently suffered an emergency.<\/p>\n<p>According to the Florida Highway Patrol, the bus, belonging to the First Baptist Church of College Hill, was traveling eastbound on Interstate 4 in the center lane. The driver, identified as <strong>Martin Rufus Silas, Jr.,<\/strong> of Seffner, lost control of the bus due to a medical emergency.<\/p>\n<p>The bus veered to the left, then to the right before colliding with a crash attenuator, located near the entrance of ramp to the eastbound Florida Department of Transportation weigh station. After the collision, the bus caught fire and was partially burned.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Silas <\/strong>suffered minor injuries and was taken to Tampa General Hospital, where he was treated for his injuries. There were no passengers on the bus at the time of the accident.<\/p>\n<p>The accident took place around 11 a.m., while traveling on Interstate 4 between I-75 and Highway 579.<\/p>\n<p>The Florida Highway Patrol investigated the accident.<\/p>\n<p><strong> <\/strong>The church did not release any information pertaining to the accident and referred all calls from<strong> <\/strong>the <strong><em>Sentinel <\/em><\/strong>to<strong> Rev. Evans Burrows, <\/strong>who was not available.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BY IRIS B. HOLTON Sentinel City Editor One of the buses belonging to an East Tampa church crashed into a wall and caught fire Monday morning. The accident took place after the driver apparently suffered an emergency. According to the Florida Highway Patrol, the bus, belonging to the First Baptist Church of College Hill, was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/210"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flsentinel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}