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In Spite Of Awareness, Fatigue Car Accidents and Others Increase

It’s not as if California car accident lawyers, transportation experts and auto safety groups are unaware of the risk from pilots, motorists, truck and bus drivers who operate their vehicles in a fatigued state.  There is defiantly enough evidence to document these risks that operating a vehicle in a fatigued state poses.  However, in spite of this, transportation agencies have not been able to come up with strong and effective proposals that can help prevent fatigue  car accidents.

A study conducted by News 21, a student reporting project and the nonprofit Center for Public Integrity has found that over the past 40 years, close to 750 people died in more than 320 fatigue-related incidents in the aviation industry alone.  A deadly plane crash in 2009 illustrated just how serious the risks from fatigued pilots can be.  In February 2009, Continental Connection Flight 3407 went down near Buffalo, New York, killing all 49 passengers and crew members on board and one person on the ground.  In the aftermath of that disaster, there was finally plenty of attention on pilot fatigue, and the risk to passenger safety.

An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board concluded that one of the factors in the accident was that the pilots had been severely fatigued at the time.  They had slept very little in the days before the crash.  In fact, one of the pilots had traveled a long way from her home in Seattle to the hub in New Jersey, from where the plane took off in the 24 hours before the crash.  The investigation found that the captain had been awake for at least 15 hours before the crash, and first officer had slept for a maximum of 8 1/2 hours.

<strong>Fatigue car accidents</strong> have also been of concern. Other transportation sectors have also been impacted by fatigued operators.  In 1993, the National Transportation Safety Board commissioned a study into drug and alcohol use as accident factors in trucking accidents.  However, they found that fatigue was an even bigger factor in trucking accidents.  That year, there were a total of 3,783 fatalities in trucking accidents, and between 30% and 40% of these deaths were related to accidents caused by fatigue.

Fortunately, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration seems to have woken up to the problem of driver fatigue in the trucking industry.  One of the biggest contributing factors in truck driver fatigue is the fact that many of these drivers are paid by the mile, and this is an incentive for them to work beyond the hours of service.  The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is currently working on new revised hours of service rules that could prevent driver fatigue.

Fatigue also continues to be an issue in the rail industry.  In 1997, an engineer dozed off at the controls of a train just outside Delia in Kansas, resulting in his train traveling past several signals.  The train crashed into an oncoming train, killing one person.

However, it is the effect of fatigue on motorists that seriously concern California auto accident lawyers.  California has no laws against operating a passenger vehicle in a fatigued state, in spite of the fact that hundreds of people are killed in such accidents every year.

The Reeves Law Group is a law firm with offices throughout California dedicated exclusively to the representation of personal injury victims, including victims of motor vehicle accidents. Please visit our website at http://www.robertreeveslaw.com/. If you desire a free consultation on a personal injury matter, please call us at (800) 644-8000 or email us at contact@robertreeveslaw.com.

The Reeves Law Group is not representing any party in the matters discussed in this posting.

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One response to “In Spite Of Awareness, Fatigue Car Accidents and Others Increase”

1. blogadmin writes:
   

   I think that they could mean different things, but also have the same definition.

   “Regardless of, in defiance of” shows up as a definition for both terms in WordWeb.

   @ April 13th, 2011 at 10:59