Smart Motorist

Couple year ago, Hugo Barrera sped east through the desert night along Interstate 10 near Tonopah, Ariz., his tractor-trailer hauling 20 tons of juice. Without braking, he slammed into Linda Saar's Ford station wagon at an estimated 65 m.p.h., pushing it into a double-trailer rig. Barrera was killed instantly. Also killed were Saar and five family members.

Police wrote that Barrera had repeatedly falsified his logbook, hiding the number of hours he was actually behind the wheel. The report concluded he was "fatigued at the time of this collision." He had been driving more than 14 hours straight.

In 1999 more than 5200 people died in accidents involving large trucks (over 10,000 pounds). "That's the equivalent of a major airline crash every two weeks," notes Rep. Frank R. Wolf (R., Va.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on Transportation. Meanwhile some 400,000 truck collisions occur annually, injuring about 130,000. Most are in cars.

To be sure, many accidents are caused by car drivers; and trucking has become safer. Deaths per 100 million vehicle-miles, which were 4.0 in 1988, dropped to 2.7 ten years later. Yet unacceptably large numbers of people are still being killed each year. America's goal, says Department of Transportation (DOT) Inspector Gen. Kenneth M. Mead, "should be to substantially reduce the absolute number of fatalities, not just the rate."

It's an ambitious, but achievable, goal -- especially if these three problem areas are attacked.

Dangerously Tired Truckers - Under current DOT regulations, truckers must take eight hours' rest after a maximum of ten hours' driving or 15 hours on duty, including loading and unloading. They cannot drive more than 70 hours a week and must list their duty time in "Hours of Service" (HOS) logbooks.

But these logs are so easily falsified that some drivers call them "comic books." Three-quarters of the truckers surveyed by the insurance industry several years ago had violated HOS regulations, a quarter saying they worked 100 or more hours a week. Most alarming, 19 percent said they'd fallen asleep at the wheel at least once in the previous month.

Fatigued truckers are a deadly menace, say Daphne and Steve Izer, founders of Parents Against Tired Truckers, an activist organization. On October 10, 1993, their son Jeffrey, 17, and three teenage friends were killed when a tractor-trailer drifted off the Maine Turnpike and crushed Jeffrey's car in the breakdown lane. The truck driver, says Daphne Izer, had slept about six hours of the previous 36 and later served three months in jail for altering his log.

Drivers told Reader's Digest they often break HOS rules to meet unrealistic delivery schedules; those who refuse runs requiring illegal hours may be blackballed or given shorter, lower-paid trips.

The experience of Wolfgang Lessing, a driver with a million miles behind him, is not untypical. In 1999 he took a job with a Phoenix company whose drivers were not paid for some of the normal delays they faced loading and unloading.

On one run, Lessing dropped his trailer in Irwindale, Calif., after 15 1/2 hours on duty, including loading and driving time, of which he'd logged ten. Legally, he should have rested eight hours. But he had to get a new load back to Phoenix for a noon delivery. Lessing at least found parking space in a crowded truck stop and got four hours' sleep. Many truckers aren't so lucky.

According to one DOT study, almost half of the nation's 1487 public highway rest areas placed time restraints on truck drivers' stops, even if they'd exceeded their HOS limits, and there was an estimated shortage of over 28,000 truck parking slots in these rest areas. Many drivers instead park dangerously on highway shoulders to snatch catnaps.

Once Lessing reached his destination, he says, no one helped him unload 15 tons of cargo. Exhausted, he returned his empty rig and told a manager he was quitting. "Some companies treat drivers like slaves," he says bitterly.

In the future, trucks may be required to carry digital recorders to verify they aren't rolling during off-duty hours. Until this technology is in place, state and federal governments will have to clamp down on companies that pressure their drivers to break the rules.

In 1997 the DOT grew suspicious that McCord Inc. in Springdale, Ark., had maintained phony logs allowing single drivers to operate with "ghost" partners, thus increasing the number of continuous hours their trucks could be on the road. Owner Loyd E. McCord was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $15,000.

According to DOT, in 1999 James Georgoulakos and Charles Georgoulakos, Jr., of C&J Trucking Company, Inc., in Londonderry, N.H., were sentenced to four months in federal prison. They had paid drivers "off the books" to make runs exceeding HOS limits. The investigation was triggered by a 1995 accident involving a C&J trucker in which four people died.

Rolling Wrecks.On June 22, 1998, Gaizka Idoeta was hauling a heavy load of recycled glass to ATI Transport in Green Brook, N.J. Cresting a hill in North Plainfield, Idoeta says his brakes failed. The runaway rig shot through a red light and plowed into a car, killing Kevin and Alecia Puckrein.

Idoeta claimed he had earlier left a message reporting failing brakes to company owner John Stangle, who denied that he got the message. Idoeta was acquitted of vehicular homicide after a witness testified that the rig showed signs of poor maintenance and that its brakes were functioning at as little as 40 percent capacity.

The vast majority of trucking firms, according to Mead, are "upstanding citizens." Still, Massachusetts state police sergeant Mike Lapointe says some companies pressure truckers to accept unsafe rigs.

"Their attitude is 'Either drive this truck or we'll find someone else who will.'" According to Lapointe, about 30 percent of the truck crashes his troopers investigated in the last six months of 1998 were caused by mechanical defects. In fact, hundreds of truckers annually alert Massachusetts troopers to dangerous rigs: "On any given day, drivers stop us, asking to write them 'out-of-service' tickets for bald tires, bad brakes or steering problems that their bosses have ignored."

Troopers issue citations requiring the rig be repaired before re-entering service. "We can't inspect every truck on the road," Lapointe says, "so we shield these drivers from company retribution." Troopers in Virginia also told Reader's Digest of truckers voluntarily asking for inspections because they feel their equipment is unsafe.

Inadequate Training. Long, difficult hours and the lure of better pay in our booming economy have caused a shortage of skilled drivers. Even with 300,000 new truckers earning their commercial driver's license (CDL) each year, companies estimate they are short 80,000. New drivers may be pushed rapidly through training schools, whose quality varies greatly from one-truck, "back yard" operations to large, well-staffed institutions such as the C-1 Professional Training Center in Indianapolis. That school gives two weeks of classroom and practical instruction, then students enter one- or two-month company training programs. "They're licensed and legal," C-1 instructor Ed Doyle notes. "But it takes several years to become a safe trucker."

Some trucking companies are so short of staff that entry-level employees become instructors after less than one year on the road. "That's the blind leading the blind," Doyle says.

Poor training is not the only problem. In 1999 in Illinois, federal prosecutors charged 31 people in a bribes-for-license scandal that involved several driving schools. At least 200 unqualified truckers, some from as far away as New York, obtained Illinois CDLs, then returned to their home states and exchanged the CDLs for equivalent licenses.

Waitung "Tony" Chan, owner/operator of the Advance Driving School in Chicago, took cash payments of up to $1500 each from CDL applicants. Chan then bribed an examiner to pass the students on their road tests, which were never even given. Over 20 untested applicants were given false certifications, which they were then free to swap for CDLs. Chan pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit extortion last March and is awaiting sentencing.

Congress has created the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, combining disparate regulatory and enforcement offices. This new bureaucracy, says Transportation Sec. Rodney E. Slater, will "get dangerous vehicles off our highways" and will help to meet his goal of reducing fatalities by 50 percent over the next decade. This is a good first step, but more are needed. "We haven't been aggressive enough in dealing with this problem," says Congressman Wolf. "We don't have time to delay any longer."

Source: Reader's Diges
By: By Malcolm McConnell

 

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