In the middle of the night in June, 2011, Anthony Dedrick could barely keep awake while driving his freight truck from South Dakota to Los Angeles.
He worried about meeting his fast-approaching deadline. He drove 11 hours straight the day before, and though he tried to sleep he managed only to get in a few hours. He finished his last cup of coffee, kept the air conditioning on and bought No-Doz—anything that would keep him awake. He was tired, and he knew it.
Next thing Dedrick knew, he blew through a stop sign, jumped the interstate and wound up in a ditch. It was the scariest moment of his life, he told me.
“Just thinking about it makes me feel sick to my stomach,” he said. “I had to call my company and had to have them call a big-rig to get me out of the ditch. It was terrifying. It was easily one of the worst nights of my life.”
I’ve known Dedrick for almost five years. I met him when he started driving trucks, before he married one of my childhood friends. The man is an inked giant; he’s well over 6 feet tall, covered in tattoos and sports a dark ZZ Top beard. He doesn’t scare easily, so when he says something was terrifying, I take him at his word.
Trucking fleets have installed technology that monitors speed and automatically applies the brakes if a trucker isn’t paying attention or nods off
But Dedrick’s experience pales in comparison to other truckers who get drowsy behind the wheel and end up in a fatal accident, such as the accident that injured comedian Tracy Morgan and killed writer James McNair off the New Jersey Turnpike on June 7, 2014.
Though fatalities involving freight trucks in the United States have decreased over the last 20 years, the average number of deaths between 2003 and 2013 hovers around 4,300 per year, according to statistics from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. A third of those crashes were caused by truckers falling asleep behind the wheel.
There are a few gadgets on the market to wake up drivers, such as phone apps that detect when drivers’ eyes are closed and earpieces that sound off an alarm when the head dips forward too far. For the commercial freight truck driver, trucking fleets have installed technology that monitors speed and automatically applies the brakes if a trucker isn’t paying attention or nods off.
“The whole goal is to get the driver back engaged,” said Alan Korn, director of advanced braking systems integration at Meritor Wabco. The company has outfitted thousands of trucks with its Onguard system, which uses radars mounted on the front bumper of a truck to recognize obstructions in the road. It also can spot other cars in front of the truck and the truck’s positioning between the lanes. If the truck, for example, approaches a car in front of it too fast, it will sound off two alarms to let the driver take action before applying the brakes.
Read more of the original article in Motherboard.
