Are trucking safety regulations being enforced?
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May 21, 2015 at 11:45 AM CST
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http://www.11alive.com/story/news/traffic/2015/05/20/trucking-safety-regulations/27680217/ Fire officials said a tractor-trailer failed to stop. It smashed into three cars and a pick-up truck before slamming into a second tractor trailer and bursting into flames. In the first car were Wendy Melton of Reidsville, Ga., Brittanie Altman of Claxton, Ga. and Virgil Moody of Hagan, Ga. – all killed. In the second car, Jerry Earnest of Varnell and Glenda Adams from Cohutta died. This comes just a month after another deadly crash on the same interstate -- killed five nursing students from Georgia Southern University. Two horrible accidents -- on the same stretch of road -- within 30 miles of each other. The Pooler police chief told our Savannah sister station WSAV that they're now looking into whether the latest accident could have been caused by the truck driver falling asleep behind the wheel. A look at records has revieved that the truck driver in that first deadly accident had a history of doing just that. On Wednesday, 11Alive obtained two of three new lawsuits filed on behalf of the families of those nursing students killed in the first accident - Catherine Pittman and Morgan Bass - along with survivor Brittney McDaniel.  The lawsuit alleges that back in 2011 the driver involved in their accident caused another accident when he fell asleep at the wheel. In fact, he was fired from a trucking company because of it. On Wednesday, the attorney behind these lawsuits told 11Alive there are federal regulations in place to prevent issues like this. The question is how well are they being enforced? "It raises the question: Should this guy have even been out there on the road at all?" Attorney Joe Fried said. The trucking company involved in this April 22 crash that killed five Georgia Southern nursing students did not do enough to answer that question. This lawsuit claims both Total Transportation of Mississippi and parent company U.S. Xpress were negligent and that the company did not do enough to check the background of its driver. "The fact that he has fallen asleep at the wheel in the past, to me, if I were a trucking company - and I think to all reasonable trucking companies - it's a huge red flag," Fried said. In recent years, the federal government has repeatedly reworked guidelines around that very issue. So how long is too long for truck drivers to spend on the road? The current federal guidelines say in a 24-hour period a driver can only work 14 hours on duty. Of those, only 11 can be actually spent on the road. The other three are to be spent loading and unloading. And each driver must have a consecutive 10 hours off-duty before beginning the next shift. Those regulations are enforced on a state level. But fried said that the problem is there simply aren't enough eyes to watch every truck on the road. So the responsibility falls on the trucking companies themselves. "We don't have a law enforcement community that is anywhere near big enough that they can adequately check everybody's log books," Fried said. "So there's an element of: We have to trust the industry to do this properly." 11Alive News looked into the safety history of trucking company involved in yesterday's crash - Georgia Freightways. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration ranks it in the 55th percentile of safety. At least four driver violations including speeding and one driver texting behind the wheel were on file. |
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