Georgia Truck Accident Lawyers Blog

Our lawyers frequently encounter heavy truck collision cases involving death and serious injury where the truck driver is in violation of federal regulations concerning the hours that can be driven in a given period. As we have written before, driver fatigue is a serious and potentially deadly problem.
Federal regulations permit a truck driver to drive a maximum of 11 hours after 10 consecutive hours off duty. They can drive a maximum of 60 hours in a seven-day period or 70 hours during an eight-day period. Before starting a shift that will run for seven or eight days straight, they must take off 34 or more consecutive hours.Last year authorities investigating a Florida crash that killed seven children discovered that, except for a brief nap, the truck driver involved had been awake but not necessarily driving for more than 34 hours before the accident. The tractor-trailer he was driving struck the rear of a car carrying the children. The car had been stopped behind a school bus dropping off students.

Estimates on the role driver fatigue plays in truck accidents differ. As many as 30 percent to 40 percent of heavy truck accidents may be related to truck driver fatigue, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board.

Florida ranked 21st, tying with Delaware, for the number of truck crash deaths per 100,000 people in 2004, with 2.17 deaths, according to data from the 2004 Fatality Analysis Reporting System and the National Center for Statistics Analysis. Wyoming was first with 8.08 deaths per 100,000 people. Hawaii was last with 0.32.

Many in the trucking industry blame shippers, not trucking companies, for the pressure some drivers are under to deliver. We have seen many cases in which truck drivers falsify logbooks so they can make up time and mileage. In many of these instances, when confronted with the falsified data, the drivers have responded that if they did not drive in excess of the mandated hours they would lose their jobs.