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| Michael Smith/Newsmakers |
Posted: Thursday, 29 October 2009 5:21AM
Truckers May Be Ordered To Take Extra Hour Of Rest
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CHICAGO (CBS) ― This is a story about 60 minutes that might mean the difference between life and death on the highways and expressways. The federal government seems ready to order truck drivers to take an extra hour to rest every day. CBS 2's Mike Parker talked to one family that really gets that idea.
Four years ago, a big rig truck, driven by a sleepy, fatigued, perhaps drugged out driver crossed the center divider on Route 120 in Round Lake. It slammed into several vehicles including Graham Brown's small sedan.
Brown was 27 when it happened. He's walking now, but it took a long time and 22 separate surgeries. He's lost the use of his left hand and arm.
His mother remembers her pain, too. She worried she was going to lose her son.
"They immediately told me he was not stable," she said. "And we almost lost him a couple other times due to complications from surgery."
Graham Brown said he felt "about as horrible as you can possibly imagine. Everything you can think of about how bad it could be, how bad it sounds, and double it."
The semi tractor trailer was hardly damaged in the wreck, unlike Brown's car. The collision sent it, crushed, airborne into a field.
Every year in the U.S. some 700 people are killed and 20,000 others are injured in big rig accidents. Many of them, like the crash in Round Lake, are caused by truckers asleep, or wasted by fatigue.
It also caused the 1999 Bourbonnais Amtrak derailment that killed 11 and injured more than 100 people.
Soon, the federal Department of Transportation is expected to require truckers to stop and rest after 10 hours of driving. Now, they can go 11 hours without sleep.
But the Browns take issue with how the driving limit is enforced. Now, truckers simply fill out a written log of their hours.
Truck driver Terrance Shumake conceded, "You do have a lot of guys with the paper logs and they do fudge the log books."
To counter that, the Brown family wants black boxes, data recorders with GPS that track everything drivers do, installed in the nation's trucks.
Driver Clark Garlock agrees. He said he has children in high school and another in the army.
"I'd like to be around to see them grow up and have grandkids," Garlock said.
There is no indication the Obama administration has any plans to require such data recorders.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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