Crash Deaths and Disabilities for Dollar$
December, 2014
Dear Care for Crash Victims Community Members:“12/8/2014
WASHINGTON — Four years ago during the Christmas season, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration released its first draft of the new Hours of Service rule with a vastly different 34-hour restart provision, prompting American Trucking Associations President and CEO Bill Graves to remark that the FMCSA had just dropped three chunks of coal in trucking Christmas stocking.
Now the tables have turned, says one well-known safety advocate.
“Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) is playing Santa Claus for the trucking industry this Christmas, but the American driving public will be paying the bill with lives forever lost and horrific injuries,” Joan Claybrook, chair, Citizens for Reliable and Safe Highways (CRASH), said Monday at a news conference at the U.S. Capitol not far from where lawmakers were debating an omnibus appropriations bill that some said would include language to suspend the current restart provision.
“Sen. Collins wants to roll back current work protections and instead allow trucking industry executives to force truck drivers to work more than 80 hours a week. This is inhumane and a formula for tired truckers wiping out innocent families in preventable truck crashes. This means big bucks to the trucking companies who are exempt from federal requirements to pay overtime to their drivers.”
The facts are that in Maine, on average, a person is dies of crash injuries every other day. So you might think that the Senior Senator from Maine would not be doing what she is doing.
Imagine if every Senator had to spend a week riding in an 18 Wheeler before voting on this legislation.
Data on fatality rates by State are available at http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812032.pdf
