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As someone who used to sell to the limousine manufacturing industry I am shocked that tragedies of this magnitude don't happen more frequently.
First the center or stretch section of the limousine is nothing more than a tubed extension of the vehicle frame with a standard floor pan and the sides are no more reinforced than a modern car door. Also the seats in the longer stretches are mostly along the sides which makes side impacts particularly nasty for the unbelted passengers.
Another problem is the fact the limo industry boomed and then crashed hard in the recession of 2008. A lot of limo builders closed shop and never came back and during the boom way over built. A lot of limos built in that period are still on the road today. In fact the limo involved in the accident was built in 2001. I called on many a limo builder in that era and truth be told a lot of them were built by small operations that did not have the kind of equipment or skilled labor to build a safe limousine.
They are just cutting a vehicle in half and adding an extension in the middle, they start with a standard vehicle bought from a dealer. Some operations split the cars on a rail system equipped with lasers to make sure they were perfectly aligned when welded back together. Smaller or lower budget operations rolled them apart on bare cement, even on asphalt and eyeballed them when welding them back together.
These cars are not stretched like they were built in Detroit. A lot of the ones I saw had undocumented day laborer types working on the cars with little or no training. Most of those cars were built with bells, whistles and luxury in mind and safety was on the low end of the priority list.
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