I was on my way to Durham, North Carolina recently to pick up my daughter from a camp at Duke University when she called to tell me there was a terrible wreck blocking I-85. She said it involved an 18-wheeler and a fatality, and the wreck was going to have the entire interstate blocked for hours. I pulled over to look up a way around that disaster, and I saw that it would be easy to take I-40 around it.
Once on I-40, traffic came to a standstill and then crept along for a while. Finally, a wreck came into view in the lanes heading in the opposite direction. It was a terrible scene involving four vehicles and an 18-wheeler. I noticed there was a chunk of metal stuck to the front of the 18-wheeler, but I couldn’t tell if that was a car or a piece of a car.
You simply must look at this picture. A thousand words will not describe it, nor would you believe the description without seeing it. It shows what an 18-wheeler can do to a pickup truck. The photos after it show what it can do to a sedan and an SUV. These are images of the wreck I recently passed in North Carolina.
My first thought was that my daughter had given me the wrong information on where the accident was. It turns out this was an entirely different wreck, and it had three fatalities! The truck driver has been charged with DUI and possession of marijuana and methadone. In the past he was convicted of rape and burglary. The company he works for has been charged before with numerous violations of rules to prevent trucker fatigue.
The way the commercial truck driver managed to completely flatten the pickup truck is, according to police, he ran into the pickup truck, then with that truck stuck to the front of the 18-wheeler, he ran into three more vehicles before coming to a stop. Three of the drivers are dead, with a fourth in the hospital, while the commercial truck driver is essentially unscathed.
I can tell you that I was scared driving all the way to Durham, and all the way back, because of the number of truckers I encountered who seemed to be going too fast, not paying attention, changing lanes on top of people, not avoiding merging vehicles, stopping too quickly, nearly jack-knifing, etc.
Because of the number of horrible fatal accidents that commercial truck drivers cause, the government has proposed new regulations for them, and the decision on whether to adopt the new rules will be made this month by July 26th. The new rules deal with reduced work hours to avoid driver fatigue. They basically propose reducing the maximum hours from 14-16 hours of driving to...14-16 hours, and just changing the methods of counting these hours.
Is that enough?! Would you trust yourself driving a fully loaded 18-wheeler in heavy traffic after more than 13 hours of driving? Just brainstorming here…but what about restricting which hours they are on the roads, so they are not out there during rush hour or even during the day at all? What about restricting the roads they drive on? Requiring more frequent drug tests? Even shorter work shifts like down to 10 hours? Drastically increasing the penalties and fines against employers of drivers who violate the rules?
I live in a large city where pre-recession I could easily count 50 18-wheelers on the freeway around me at any given time, and now that number is down to about 20. That’s still 20 humongous trucks that could crush my car to smithereens in a second. To think that the drivers may have been on the road more than 13 hours already when I encounter them, or under the influence, or with the truck overloaded, or with the driver distracted by food, cell phones and other things…I don’t really feel safe yet, but I applaud the government for trying to take a step in the right direction.