Truck Driver Fatigue Studied By NTSB
Our Atlanta heavy truck accident lawyers frequently litigate serious injury and death cases in which truck driver fatigue plays a crucial role in the crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board said yesterday that trucking companies should be more diligent in ensuring that heavy truck drivers get rest, and the use of alarm systems to alert exhausted truckers should be required by the government.
The NTSB hearing, held in Washington, D.C., was occasioned by a crash in western Wisconsin three years ago in which a bus carrying a high school band slammed into an overturned semitrailer, killing five people.
NTSB investigators concluded that the truck driver fell asleep at the wheel and began to drift off the interstate's shoulder. When he swerved back onto the road, the rig overturned. The bus then plowed into the truck.
While drivers are ultimately responsible for getting enough rest, trucking companies many times base payment on performance in terms of miles traveled. This encourages drivers to drive excessive hours while fatigued. and to falsify log books which are required to show the hours driven and mandated periods of rest. Fatigue is a factor in about one in eight large-truck crashes.
At the hearing, NTSB staff discussed technology still in the early stages which may eventually prevent such fatigue-induced crashes. One example is a dashboard-mounted camera that tracks a driver's eye and eyelid movements and could alert a driver who appears to be falling asleep.
Even low-tech measures are effective. Studies have disclosed that rumble strips , textured strips of pavement that produce vibrations when a driver passes over them , reduce fatigue related crashes by up to 60 percent.
