Because driver fatigue is one of the most pervasive safety issues in interstate trucking, trucking safety regulations for many years have included rules on how many hours a driver may drive and be on duty. In almost every serious trucking accident, the accuracy of paper driver logs becomes an issue.…
Truck driver fatigue is a prime cause of catastrophic commercial trucking crashes that cause serious injuries and deaths. Over recent years in my Atlanta-based law practice, I have seen recurring controversy about the rules designed to combat driver fatigue. Well, here we go again. This week the Federal Motor Carrier…
Interstate trucking accidents keep happening, and as a trucking accident trial attorney in Atlanta, I keep seeing the tragic results. Many of those crashes are due at least in part to driver fatigue. But in Washington the government is behind schedule for approval of revisions to truck drivers’ hours of…
A fatal truck crash early Saturday morning on I-285 south of Atlanta highlighted an important safety rule governing interstate commercial trucking. According to an article by George Mathis and Ty Tagamihe of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the incident began when the tractor-trailer was involved in a minor collision with another large…
The Centers for Disease Control released last week a report on truck driver health risks related to Irregular schedules, long hours of work, poor diet and nutrition, and the stress of driving in heavy traffic and bad weather. The CDC reported: Life expectancy: 61 for truck drivers, 77 for national…
Monday was a rainy day here, and in the rain there were at least three tractor trailer wrecks on the Atlanta expressways. The worst was on I-285 Northbound just above I-20 West, as a tractor trailer overturned after colliding with at least one other vehicle. One of the basic rules…
In our trucking accident litigation practice in Georgia, I sometimes run across fly-by-night trucking companies with terrible safety ratings that go out of business but then reopen under another name and DOT number but with the same people and equipment. Sometimes I have a case against the old company with…
As a trucking accident trial attorney in Georgia, half of my work seems to be ferreting out the facts that the other side wants to conceal. For years much of the challenge has been in attempting to prove driver fatigue by piercing the fog of deception in paper driver logs…
As a trucking accident injury trial attorney in Atlanta, Georgia, I sometimes run across truck drivers about whom I wonder how they ever passed a medical exam. In a case last year, when I dug into records and took depositions, I found that a truck driver with extensive heart disease…
The school bus crash this week at Temple, Georgia, highlights several issues about school bus safety. * According to an eyewitness on the bus, Rashawn Walker, the 17 year old student who was ejected and killed, had pulled back another student and saved her from being ejected as the bus…