It took nearly a week, but crews from the Georgia Department of Transportation finally finished repair work on a section of I-20 that had traffic backed up for miles on a daily basis. The damage was caused when an 18 wheeler crashed into the middle divider. The truck driver lost control and flipped over, closing several lanes and destroying a guardrail. Luckily no one was injured, but the accident could have been far worse.
Police reported that the cause of the truck wreck was truck driver fatigue and fell asleep at the wheel. This caused the truck to overturn and damage the Savannah River Bridge. The damage forced GDoT crews to delay the slab work they were doing on the other side of the road so the bridge could be repaired and traffic could return to normal. However, this accident could have been far worse.
NHTSA says that 45,637 people died in truck-related accidents in 2012, but did you know that experts believe that the majority of those crashes happened due to trucker fatigue? These kinds of accidents can happen at any time of the day and often without warning, so lawmakers have written rules and regulations to help keep these accidents from happening.
How Are We Preventing Trucker Fatigue?
Lawmakers created drive time limits for truckers to reduce the hours they spend on the road without rest, but some companies and drivers have circumvented these laws to deliver cargo in unrealistic timeframes. Authorities are striking back with new technology-an electronic logging system-that will keep truckers and companies honest about the hours driven by a single person. These e-logs have already shown promise for reducing fatigued driving incidents, and new regulations may soon require all truckers to use these e-logs.
These new regulations could help protect the innocent drivers of Georgia from out-of-control big rigs, but there are even more ways to protect yourself. To learn more about what you can do to prevent truck accidents in Georgia, keep following our blog, and log onto our Twitter and Facebook pages to share your ideas on how to make Georgia safer.
