Boulder Victims May Split Just $400,000

DENVER — Colorado lawmakers, discounting the sympathetic promises of Gov. Roy Romer, said Tuesday that bus passengers killed or injured by a seven-ton boulder that was accidentally pushed off a mountainside by a state road crew would be limited to a share of $400,000 in compensation.

Romer, who named a top-level team to investigate the Monday accident that killed seven people and injured 15 others, said Tuesday that he planned to “unbureaucratize” the process for claiming damages against the state.

“I am chief executive . . . and my first response is, we caused an injury,” Romer said at a news conference. “What can we do to work out a fair way (for compensation) within the limits of the law?

“I am sick and tired of people who try to avoid liability when it is there,” and if the state’s legal limit of $400,000 on compensation for the accident is not enough, he said, he would ask the Legislature for more money.

But leaders of the Republican-controlled Colorado House and Senate met Tuesday morning with Romer, a Democrat, and initially rejected that suggestion.

“It’s far too premature to say that,” Senate President Ted Strickland said. “Of course, he can’t take back what he said in the papers. He said it out of human compassion. But we can’t make an exception to that law.”

State of Emergency

Romer and his aides worked until midnight Monday calling families of accident victims, and they started again Tuesday morning. He also declared a state of emergency so the state could use $100,000 in contingency funds to transport relatives of the victims to Colorado.

Four investigations into the accident were under way Tuesday, counting the one by Romer’s special panel. Other agencies that have launched inquiries are the National Transportation Safety Board, the Colorado State Patrol and the Colorado Highway Department.

Six people were killed instantly when the boulder--six feet high and four feet across, and estimated by state engineers to weigh seven tons--rolled down a mountainside below 11,315-foot Berthoud Pass on Monday and ripped out the right side of a Gray Line tour bus. Another person died at Denver General Hospital.

The 28 passengers and driver were taking Gray Line’s $30 “Circle Tour,” a one-day trip that starts in Denver and loops through Rocky Mountain National Park before returning to Denver. The bus was about 60 highway miles northwest of Denver when the boulder slammed into it.

The boulder, dislodged by a Colorado Highway Department maintenance crew working on the mountainside, rolled through several hundred feet of trees before it hit the highway and the bus.

A state geologist who followed the boulder’s path said the odds against the tragedy occurring were “astronomical.”

‘A Little Faster’

“If the boulder had been traveling a little faster, or a little slower. Or if the bus had been going a little faster or a little slower . . .” said geologist Ed Belknap of the Colorado Highway Department.

“It was like a pinball game. The speed was variable. It would hit a tree and then slow down. Then it would start up again. It deflected back and forth,” Belknap said after he followed the boulder’s route.

The dead were identified as John Killeen, 54, of Denver; Arlene Johnson, 61, of Renville, Minn.; Sol Stewart, 67, and his wife, Gladys, in her 60s, of Moulton, Ala.; Anne Hayes, 59, of Anaheim, Calif., and Keith Walters, 55, and Kathleen Walters, 60, both of Mowson, Australia.