Companies often force their drivers to work shifts with little or no sleep Road-weary truckers risk lives on the job
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
“There are some days you can’t think right anymore. You can’t tell if you’re driving or not. You just have to continue working.”
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
Jose Juan Rodriguez
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 they know to be pervasive but difficult to quantify. “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.”
Caught at the gate
Recognizing a 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. 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 publicly available 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 10-hour 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 federal 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. The office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called for investigations into companies that create a public health threat. “Federal hours of service laws exist for the safety of drivers and all of us,” spokesman Alexander Comisar said. “Violations are unacceptable.”
Law enforcement officials and experts say companies are legally responsible for knowing their workers’ hours.
It can be a federal crime if managers routinely encourage or pressure truckers to stay on the road past the limit.
“Companies that force exhausted truck drivers to stay behind the wheel are gambling with the lives of everyone on the road,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a statement.
Dog-eat-dog industry
In the competitive, cutthroat world of container delivery, many companies are willing to risk using fatigued drivers, the USA TODAY Network found.
Gate entry data show that nearly 900 companies dispatched at least one truck past the legal limit over four years. Some of the busiest companies each had thousands of potential violations.
Lincoln Transportation trucks operated 5,200 times for more than 14 hours without a 10-hour stop. That is about 6% of company activity from 2013 to 2016.
Since 2014, Lincoln drivers have repeatedly accused the company in ongoing lawsuits of cheating them of fair pay.
One Lincoln trucker, Jose Arroyos, testified in a 2016 California Labor Commissioner case that he worked almost 15 hours a day, five days a week, for years.
Lincoln Transportation did not respond to requests for comment. In labor court, executives denied pressuring drivers to work against their will.
Lincoln trucks have been involved in
29 crashes that injured six people from
2013 to 2016, federal records show. Freddy Uriarte, a father and grandfather who drove for Lincoln for four years, died in one of the accidents. Police reports, interviews with family members and port records give a clear picture of Uriarte’s breakneck schedule leading up to his death.
On a Wednesday in March 2014, he went to bed at 5:30 a.m. after 26 hours of hauling containers over two days. Four and a half hours later he was awake, running errands before going back to work.
By 1 p.m. he was moving containers again. He drove without a break until nearly midnight, when he was on his way to the city of Chino with a load of black Rosetti handbags and totes.
Uriarte didn’t notice what everyone else on Riverside Freeway saw: a broken-down FedEx rig. His truck slammed into the back of the trailer at full speed.
Uriarte died in the hospital. The other motorist, Jeffrey Brunner, survived with a broken back and head injuries.
Weak enforcement
The USA TODAY Network’s analysis of gate and inspection data shows that even when regulators check trucks that have been on duty 14 hours or more, they have cited them for breaking time rules less than 2% of the time. Experts say that disparity shows the difficulty police have proving fatigue violations.
“There is a tremendous amount of hours violations that we do not catch,” said Mooney at the Safety Alliance.
State records show inspections rarely lead to hours-of-service violations. Most of the busiest companies received “satisfactory” safety ratings from the California Highway Patrol after their most recent inspection, records show.
Reporters reviewed five years of state inspection reports from 10 companies with histories of labor complaints. Of the more 300 violations inspectors uncovered, only one involved a driver’s hours on the road.
Pacific 9 illustrates how regulators fail to hold companies accountable, even when there is evidence of hours violations. According to state records, the trucking company has not been cited for an hours violation in at least five years.
But 20 drivers have testified in recent labor court cases that they worked up to
19 hours a day and wouldn’t get paid until they falsified inspection reports. Pacific 9 has denied the allegations.
Gate data show Pacific 9 drivers may have operated past the legal limit more than 8,000 times from 2013 to 2016. The company did not allow two drivers to share a truck, executives told reporters.
In January 2015 — the same month California Highway Patrol officers inspected the company — trucks appear to have been on the road without proper breaks at least 120 times, the data show.
The officers’ visit that month was prompted by a tipster who said Pacific 9 had been dispatching drivers over the legal limit and then destroying the evidence. But police couldn’t find any proof and determined the allegations of excessive hours were unfounded.
Jon Wong Park is one of many Pacific
9 drivers who have talked openly about violating fatigue laws. He said company dispatchers would tell him to change his logbooks if they showed hours that might get the company in trouble.
“Legally they’re supposed to stop me,” Park told a reporter. “But they kept giving me the jobs.”
By 11 p.m. on March 26, 2014, Park had worked more than 45 hours in less than three days, port data show.
As he pulled into desert city of Victorville, he didn’t see the woman crossing Hesperia Road in front of him.
Bernice Williams went under the truck’s grill and died from head injuries.
Park said he didn’t fall asleep at the wheel and denied feeling overly tired. He was convicted of misdemeanor hit and run but faced no other charges.
The San Bernardino Sheriff ’s deputy who first investigated never checked Park’s logbooks the night of the accident because “he has no official training in commercial enforcement,” according to the department.
Pacific 9 Chief Operating Officer Alan Ta conceded the company’s drivers “had issues with hours” until recently, when Pacific 9 stopped using independent contractors.
Today all company drivers are employees, which makes them easier to monitor, he said.
“I don’t think it was just us,” Ta said. “It was multiple companies.
“That’s the past. I’m not trying to change the past. What’s done is done.”