alt Hacker NewsYea, if you listen to the ATC audio, you can hear that in addition to the normal high workload of handling both ground and tower, this guy had an emergency aircraft on a taxiway to deal with, too. A lot of holes in the swiss cheese lined up, but one of them clearly is ATC workload.
Perhaps in a scenario where there is an active emergency and one controller, protocol should be that ground and air frequencies are combined.
That would have given the jet a chance to hear the truck cleared to cross the runway they were landing on.