Weary truckers danger on road
Companies often force their drivers to work shifts with little or no sleep
Recognizing a public health threat, the federal government began limiting commercial truckers’ driving hours in 1938, holding them to 60 hours a week.
Since then, the tools used to flag truckers who stay on the road too long haven’t changed much. Authorities still rely heavily on paper logs maintained by the drivers themselves.
A USA TODAY NETWORK investigation shows fatigued truckers are a near-constant threat on the roads around America’s busiest ports.
“There are some days when you can’t think right anymore. You can’t tell if you’re driving or not. You just have to continue working.” Jose Juan Rodriguez
Every day, port trucking companies around Los Angeles put hundreds of impaired drivers on the road, pushing them to work with little or no sleep in violation of federal safety regulations, a USA TODAY Network investigation found.
They dispatch truckers for shifts that last up to 20 hours a day, six days a week, sometimes with tragic results.
In August 2013, a Container Intermodal Transport trucker, who said in depositions that he often broke fatigue laws, barreled into stopped traffic at 55 mph. A teenager was killed, and seven people were sent to the hospital.
Seven months later, a Pacific 9 Transportation driver had just finished his 45th hour on the clock in three days when he ran over and killed a woman crossing the street.
A Gold Point Transportation truck was moving containers for 15 hours one day in May 2013 when it crashed in Long Beach, Calif., injuring four.
The trucking industry has always had drivers who work reckless amounts of overtime. The USA TODAY Network investigation shows for the first time that fatigued truckers are a near-constant threat on the roads around America’s busiest ports.
To identify port trucking companies that put their drivers and the public at risk, reporters retraced the movement of thousands of Los Angelesarea trucks over four years, using time stamps generated each time a driver passes through a port gate.
Reporters then calculated how long each truck had operated and compared the results with federal crash data from 2013 to 2016.
The analysis found that, on average, trucks serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach operated 470 times a day without the required break. Those trucks were involved in at least 189 crashes within a day of an extended period on the clock. Federal crash records do not indicate who was at fault.
With some exceptions, federal rules say commercial truckers must take a 10hour break every 14 hours.
The data alone don’t prove that a trucker was driving impaired. But regulators and experts said the analysis provides strong evidence of a problem.
“There’s enough there to warrant further investigation,” said Collin Mooney, executive director of the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, an association of industry regulators dedicated to improving safety.
As the USA TODAY Network first reported in June, California port truckers have been forced to work long days against their will.
Over the past decade, many companies pushed drivers into debt by requiring them to buy trucks through company-sponsored lease-to-own programs.
Drivers found themselves trapped in jobs that paid them pennies per hour after expenses. If they complained or refused to work long hours, they could be fired and lose their truck along with thousands paid toward its purchase.
Trucking company executives contacted by the Network denied allowing their drivers to violate fatigue rules. Some noted that two drivers sometimes share one truck, a practice that could account for long stints of activity.
Drivers said sharing a truck is rare because many companies prohibit it. Far more common, they said, are truckers who feel compelled to work long hours.
Jose Juan Rodriguez, who drove for Morgan Southern for five years, said he sometimes worked 16-hour shifts for days at a time, a claim the company denied. He kept a bucket of ice water by his seat to splash on his face when he felt himself nodding off.
More than once, he said, he found himself hallucinating, a side effect of extreme sleep deprivation.
“There are some days when you can’t think right anymore,” he said. “You can’t tell if you’re driving or not. You just have to continue working.”
Recognizing a potential public health threat, the federal government began limiting commercial truckers’ driving hours in 1938, holding them to 60 hours a week. Decades of study led to more stringent rules as researchers concluded sleep-deprived drivers become exponentially more hazardous the longer they spend on the road.
Even so, the tools used to flag truckers who stay on the road too long haven’t changed much.
Police and Department of Transportation inspectors still rely heavily on paper logs maintained by the drivers themselves.
The first federal mandate to install electronic log machines in commercial trucks took effect in late December, although questions remain about how quickly companies will comply.
In the absence of an accurate tracking system, the USA TODAY Network used public records to build a database noting each time a truck entered or exited the ports of Long Beach or Los Angeles. The data offer a rough sketch of how thousands of trucks operated each day from 2013 through 2016. They show 580,000 instances when trucks spent at least 14 hours on the road without a 10hour break. Those would be violations if a truck was operated by just one driver.
The activity amounts to about 8.3% of port traffic but represents a substantial amount of time on the road.
Assuming drivers picked up a new load each time they went in and out of a gate, those trucks moved 1.6 million shipping containers along Los Angelesarea highways over four years.
Yemisi Bolumole, an associate professor of supply chain management at Michigan State University, said the analysis makes clear that safety laws have not been enforceable because “we are relying on carrier or driver honesty.”
At the request of the USA TODAY Network, Bolumole’s fellow researcher, Jason Miller, reviewed Department of Transportation data on safety and maintenance citations from a sample of large trucking companies across the country. He found that port trucking is consistently one of the most dangerous sectors in the industry. Its drivers are almost 50% more likely to break hours-ofservice rules than the industry average.
“It’s mind-boggling,” Miller said.