LITTLE ROCK, ARK. ? After the nation’s deadliest bus accident in more than five years, regulators and industry experts say more enforcement of existing standards could improve the safety of people who ride tour buses to casinos and other destinations.

A charter bus crash in Arkansas on Oct. 9 killed 14 people who had been headed to a Mississippi casino. On Mother’s Day 1999, 22 were killed when a casino-bound bus crashed in New Orleans.

“Our industry has to do more than pay lip service to safety,” said Norm Littler, spokesman for the United Motorcoach Assn., which represents about 800 bus companies. “If the public loses faith in our ability to carry them safely, then we no longer have an industry.”

After the bus crash in Arkansas, investigators said they found cracks in the vehicle’s rear frame rails that likely existed before the wreck.

The cracks, they say, should have been detected during an inspection conducted for the Illinois Department of Transportation in August. Had the flaw been discovered, federal investigators say, the bus would have been ordered out of service. It was owned by Walters Bus Service Inc. of Chicago.

A cracked frame rail weakens a bus’ structure and could contribute to an accident, although it is unlikely this happened in the Arkansas crash, said Collin Mooney, a director with the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance.

Regardless of whether the cracks contributed to the accident, industry experts say the fact that they weren’t detected backs the need for more widespread inspections.

“This industry has really been shaken by this accident,” said Pete Pantuso, president of the American Bus Assn., which represents 65 percent of the industry’s 4,000 motorcoach companies.

Federal law requires that motorcoach buses be inspected annually, and state laws may require inspections every six months. Paperwork from these detailed inspections — which can be done by the bus owner or garages — must be available to state or federal inspectors.

David Longo, spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, said that, of 650,000 truck and bus companies that the federal agency covered, between 12,000 and 13,000 underwent comprehensive safety reviews each year.

“We’re seeing less than 2 percent of all the carriers on a comprehensive basis, and we believe we need to do better,” Longo said.

Statistics from the American Bus Assn. show there are about 40,000 motorcoaches on the road, but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration said that, in 2003, there were 10,656 comprehensive inspections.

Littler said the federal government allotted money each year to states for inspections of commercial vehicles, but not all states use it for buses. “There’s a number of states where an operator is never going to receive an inspection,” Littler said.

Given all of this work — 2 million to 3 million truck and bus inspections each year — a very low percentage of the motorcoaches on the roads are actually checked, Longo said.

“Our agency has finite monetary and personnel resources,” Longo said. “So our enforcement activity is targeted to identify high-risk carriers.”