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Throughout history, epidemics  have swept through populations.  Waves of pandemic — bubonic plague, cholera, smallpox and influenza — have killed  hundreds of millions of people. Now we face the  COVID-19 pandemic.

The effects of this epidemic, both medical and economic, could be historically devastating. For at least the next few months, our lives will be changed radically by  “social distancing,” closing of schools and businesses, decrease of business especially in travel, retail and hospitality industries, shortages of food and supplies, and unpredictable ripple effects.

As any trucker will tell you, if a truck doesn’t deliver it, you don’t get it. To keep hospitals supplied, grocery stores stocked, fuel tanks filled, mail and online purchases delivered, trucks must keep running. We should appreciate the work good truckers do.

You got a dreaded phone call that a loved one is being transported to a hospital, or worse, after being hit by a tractor trailer, semi, dump truck, or other large commercial vehicle. What do you do?

First, you should be aware that the trucking company and its insurance company have a rapid response team on the scene almost immediately to identify, capture and “massage” evidence. That evidence is time-sensitive. Depending on the sophistication of the law enforcement officers who respond to the crash, critical evidence may be lost while your family member is struggling for her life in the hospital.

We have seen cases in which driver logs were “lost” while police were managing traffic control as the insurer’s investigator was crawling around the truck cab. We have seen trucks removed without authorization from police impound and put back on the road, erasing critical electronic data on “hard stops,” while the insurance company’s lawyer pretended to cooperate in scheduling a joint inspection.

In Chattooga County, GA, near where I spent my childhood, a log truck jack knifed Friday and struck an oncoming passenger car. Two women in the car were transported to a hospital in Rome. Fortunately, an infant in the car, apparently secured in an infant seat, appeared to be unharmed.

From the news photo and map, it appear that the crash occurred as the log truck was driving into Summerville from the direction of Menlo while the women in the car were going the opposite direction toward Menlo.

I’ve been down that road hundreds of times. I still pass that way several times a year, most recently on Memorial Day weekend going to tend to family graves on Decoration Sunday at Mentone. My father was principal of Menlo School, back when Menlo had both a red light and a high school. I may be the only lawyer in Georgia who knows most of the words to the old Menlo Alma Mater and fight song.

The minimum insurance requirements for interstate general freight trucking have remained unchanged since 1980 while the purchasing power of that amount of money can continually eroded. Such long delays can produce updates that, when they come, can seem abrupt.

Last week, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee (MCSAC) recommended updating the minimums coverage for interstate general freight trucking from $750,000 per collision, which set in 1980. Adjusting this number by the inflation rate for health care costs results in a present day value of $4,422,000.

After lengthy study, on May 20, 2014, the MCSAC voted to recommend the FMCSA begin rule making to change the minimum financial responsibility requirement to $4.422 million, with some phase-in period and with automatic adjustment to the medical CPI every four years. From what I hear, the inflation-adjusted insurance minimums will not likely go into effect until about 2017.

Sleep deprivation among overworked big rig truck drivers is a well-known safety hazard on the highways. For years there have been political, regulatory and court battles over which driver fatigue and hours-of-service regulations should be implemented.

It is intuitive common sense that sleep deprivation reduces alertness in any job, including one that involves operating an 80,000 pound vehicle across the county on our highways so that dozing off can be a major threat to safety of others. Truck drivers are not different from the rest of us. They just operate bigger machines on the roads.

Now we have a little more science to explain the need for sleep. Researchers at the University of Rochester have found that sleep serves a function of cleaning out toxic waste products produced by cells in the brain that accumulates while we are awake. Those byproducts include beta-amyloid protein, clumps of which form plaques found in the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. Other neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, are also associated with a backup of too much cell waste in the brain.

Thus, sleep has been called the “ultimate brain washer.”
As we sleep, neurons shrink, widening channels for cerebrospinal fluid to flush out metabolites, cellular waste products, twice as fast. This a network that drains waste from the brain, called the glymphatic system, works by circulating cerebrospinal fluid throughout the brain tissue and flushing waste into the bloodstream, which then carries it to the liver for detoxification and elimination. All of us need sleep to allow this to happen.

When we become chronically sleep derived, gunk builds up in our brains. As most of us have experienced, too little sleep causes slower reactions, worse decision making, mental fog and crankiness. If sleep deprivation persists, it can cause increased risks of migraines, seizures and even death. As the body craves sleep, it will take precedence over our work duties.

In my law practice, I have often discussed fatigue issues with truck drivers. One who stands out in my memory was a trucker from Ohio who reluctantly admitted in deposition that his entire log was falsified to make his trips look good. But the truth was that he had been driving 20 of the previous 24 hours when he hit a family and killed their son. His plan to was to make a quick turnaround in Atlanta and go straight back to Ohio. If he had made it that far, he would have been driving for something like 32 hours out of 40. His employer had no system in place to guard against that. A federal judge stated in an order that the company “turned a blind eye to safety.”

Other interstate truck drivers have told me informally, sometimes over many cups of coffee at a Waffle House or truck stop along the interstate, of being pressured by trucking companies, shipper and brokers to make delivery runs that could not possibly be made without violating hours-of-service rules. Sometimes there are long delays in getting loads, which they are then expected to get across the country by a delivery deadline that is not adjusted to the load time. The entire malfunction of the logistics system is dumped on the weary shoulders of a truck driver who is only human.

That is why in trucking cases we seek the root cause of a crash, which often is in the company’s management system that ignores the body’s need for rest, rather just a tired driver’s actions in the last ten seconds before a crash.

Most of us who have endured long periods of chronic sleep deprivation due to demands of work, parenting or other activities, can relate to the effects of chronic fatigue and sleep deprivation on professional truck drivers. While there is a temptation to take pride in ability to soldier on without adequate sleep, biology ultimately catches up with us all.
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