July/August 2006
More cars and trucks are driving more miles every year, and truck accident fatalities are slowly rising. With driver behavior a factor in most large truck crashes, safety training can help prepare drivers for the rigors of the road.
By Chris Munford
In the time it takes to read this article, someone will die in a traffic accident somewhere in the United States. At least 51 people will be injured. U.S. road deaths averaged 118 per day, or more than 43,000 last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Nearly 2.7 million people suffered road injuries. Driving is a dangerous business, and nobody knows this better than the truckers who ply the nation’s highways. Roughly one in every eight road deaths involves a large truck, according to 2004 data from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
The scrap recycling industry relies heavily on trucking. Add the hazards of recycling—it’s the fifth-most-dangerous industry in the nation, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics fatality data—to the hazards of truck driving, and you’ve got a strong incentive to implement effective truck driver safety programs.
The trucking news is not all bad. The number of people injured in large-truck crashes has dropped 33 percent from 1999 to 2005. (The U.S. Department of Transportation defines large trucks as those with a gross vehicle weight rating of more than 10,000 pounds.) And over a 20-year period, deaths per truck mile traveled have fallen significantly. In 1984 there were 4.63 deaths for every million vehicle miles. In 2004 that rate had dropped by more than half, to 2.29 deaths. (Preliminary 2005 figures are slightly higher, at 2.35 deaths.) The fact remains, however, that there are nearly 400,000 truck-related crashes in the United States each year, and an estimated 5,226 people died in large-truck crashes last year.
Even as more recyclers institute training programs to improve truck driver safety, they’re fighting an uphill battle. Drivers are up against deteriorating roads, more distractions, and greater traffic congestion. Traffic, in particular, is a serious concern. In 2005, U.S. roads contained 243 million registered vehicles, an increase of nearly 5 million vehicles in just one year. U.S. vehicle miles traveled now total nearly 3 trillion annually, with trucks accounting for roughly 8 percent of that figure.
The number of trucks on the road and the miles they travel are increasing as well. From 1994 to 2004, the number of registered large trucks increased 24 percent, to nearly 8.2 million. The number of truck miles driven increased 33 percent, to 226.5 billion, in that same period, according to the DOT.
Drivers and the companies that employ them are also up against the fact that truck-related accidents tend to be more serious than those involving most other vehicles.
In general, the larger the truck, the greater the damage. Nearly 90 percent of all truck-related fatalities involve vehicles with a GVW rating of more than 26,000 pounds. The rate of truck-related fatalities per mile driven is more than 60 percent higher than the fatality rate for all types of vehicles. (The overall NHTSA fatality rate per million miles was about 1.46 in 2005.) In short, driving a truck remains difficult and is getting more so all the time. Driver safety has never been more important.
Crash Factors
“Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do,” says Barney Boynton, ISRI’s director of safety outreach. “People know how to drive a vehicle. It’s just that we get distracted, or we’re in a hurry. We’re talking on cell phones or eating lunch when we’re supposed to be concentrating on the road—[we’re] doing more than one thing at once. Or it’s the end of the day; we’re tired and not focused on the job.”
Emotions also play a huge role in driver behavior, Boynton says.
“It’s the road rage thing. Maybe somebody cut us off, so we react. We need to take time out and focus on what we really need to be doing when we’re driving. Truck driving is all about attitude,” he adds.
Boynton points to a recent FMCSA study, which found that approximately 87 percent of all truck accidents are related to driver behavior. (Most of the rest are attributed to equipment failure, weather, road and construction hazards, or shifting loads.) Though frequent vehicle inspections and maintenance are important, the big push obviously needs to be on changing driver behavior, he says. “We all know right from wrong,” he adds, “but we choose how we behave on the road.” (For tips on how to behave better, see “How to Short-Circuit Road Rage” on page 82.)
Conducted with the help of NHTSA, the study found that drivers of large trucks—as well as drivers of other vehicles involved in truck crashes—are 10 times more likely than other factors to be the cause of a crash. Two-thirds of crashes were caused by driver inattention or distraction or drivers making poor decisions about speed, their distance from other vehicles, or the behavior of other drivers. Factors contributing to these errors among truck drivers included the use of prescription and over-the-counter drugs, fatigue, and a lack of familiarity with the road. The study looked at 967 crashes that caused injuries or fatalities in 17 states over a 33-month period through December 2003. (Read the full report at www.fmcsa.dot.gov/facts-research/research-technology/report/ltccs-2006.htm)
In addition to the obvious human costs of truck-related deaths and injuries, scrap recyclers also face substantial financial costs related to vehicle crashes—and those costs are rising. The FMCSA estimates that a company with a 5-percent profit margin needs to generate an additional $500,000 in income to cover all of the direct and indirect costs arising from a $25,000 accident. For one with a 2-percent profit margin, the additional income needed is $1.25 million.
The agency notes that direct costs of a vehicle crash can arise from cargo and vehicle damage, towing, storage of the damaged vehicle, injury or other medical expenses, loss of revenue, administrative expenses, police reports, and potentially higher insurance and workers’ compensation premiums. But there are indirect, or hidden, costs to consider as well: the loss of customers and sales, meetings and work time missed by injured workers, the supervisor’s time and time needed to hire or train new employees, the downtime and accelerated depreciation of damaged equipment, and the cost of renting replacement vehicles. Even further, consider the cost of the poor public relations a crash can generate—and the cost of potentially greater scrutiny from government agencies.
Measurable Results
That litany of costs should give recyclers more reasons than ever to implement truck driver safety programs. But do such programs work?
Yes they do, according to Al Elvins, who oversees safety at Macon Iron & Paper Stock Co. Inc. (Macon, Ga.). His company has shown that truck driver safety training produces results when the program is well-designed and aggressively pursued over time. The company, which operates a 14-truck fleet that racks up 900,000 vehicle miles annually, has not had a lost-time injury in more than two and a half years. One of the company’s subsidiaries has gone more than five years without an accident. This track record has earned Macon Iron & Paper numerous local and national safety awards and citations in recent years.
This enviable safety record didn’t come easily. Elvins says it took three years to change the company culture and to get all employees to focus on safety rather than just talk about it.
“The first year you get a reaction [from employees] like disbelief. People think they already know all about safety,” he says. Sooner or later, he adds, they come to realize that the company is absolutely serious about the subject.
In addition to driver training sessions and drug screenings, the company’s safety program includes daily “toolbox meetings” in which all supervisors meet with their crews to discuss safety procedures and possible problems. The firm’s safety manual—more than 80 pages thick—instructs drivers on many subjects, including a rule that forbids them from using cell phones while their vehicle is in motion.
In one of the program’s more novel aspects, employees receive color-coded hard hats indicating their length of service and experience. Drivers maneuvering trucks in the company’s yards know they need to take extra precautions when a nearby employee’s hat color indicates he or she is new to the job.
“If drivers are involved in an accident, or they’ve been pulled over [by law enforcement], or there is any question at all of a truck not being safe, we get them off the road immediately,” Elvins says. “All drivers are issued cameras and cell phones to use in emergencies.”
For Macon, “safety is not a word, it’s a process,” Elvins adds, “but you have to focus on people as well as on the process. Most accidents are due to unsafe acts by a person.”
It can be difficult to precisely measure the progress of a company’s driver-safety efforts. But Elvins has come up with one possible yardstick—the result of a government data-entry error that earned his company a surprise on-site audit by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“A full-blown OSHA audit will easily get the typical scrap metal operation $50,000 in fines,” Elvins says. “We got about $750 in fines.” In fact, he notes, “When they interviewed our employees, one temp worker complained that we spend too much time on safety training.”
Association Action
ISRI is taking steps to help increase awareness and promote driver safety in the scrap industry. That was one subject discussed at the October 2005 inaugural meeting of the ReMA National Safety Committee, and Elvins led an hour-long discussion of the topic at the group’s May 2006 meeting.
To further aid driver training initiatives, ReMA will soon release a new DVD titled Truck Driver Safety as part of its “Safely or Not at All” series. One of the DVD’s narrators, Darrel John Wooster, corporate safety director for Mercer Group International (Trenton, N.J.), perhaps best summarized what driver safety is all about: “You’ve got to concentrate because anything that distracts you from driving can get you catastrophically injured or dead. There’s no way you should go to a job and not come home at night.”
How to Short-Circuit Road Rage
Government studies find that driver behavior is the biggest cause of truck accidents. A significant number of behavior-related accidents might involve aggressive driving, commonly known as “road rage.”
Reliable statistics on road rage are hard to find—most aggressive driving incidents are thought to go unreported. A study of National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data by the Surface Transportation Policy Project (Washington, D.C.) estimated that in 1996, 56 percent of highway deaths involved aggressive driving, which it defined as speeding above 80 mph, tailgating, failing to yield, weaving in and out of traffic, passing on the right, making improper and unsafe lane changes, and running stop signs and red lights.
The proportion of highway fatalities caused by aggressive driving remained nearly constant from 1991 to 1996, the study noted. (To read the report, go to www.transact.org/report.asp?id=58.)
Barney Boynton, ISRI’s director of safety outreach, says it’s crucial to teach drivers to short-circuit the road rage cycle. He offers some ground rules:
• Don’t “play the game.”
• Let the other motorist “win.”
• Take an emotional time-out.
• Remember that getting home safely is what matters most. AAA offers further advice on preventing road rage:
• Reduce stress in your daily life.
• Don’t drive when you’re angry or over-tired.
• Remain calm if provoked.
• Don’t make eye contact with aggressive drivers.
For brochures on combatting aggressive driving—in English and Spanish—visit www.nhtsa.dot.gov/people/injury/aggressive/Aggressive%20Web/index.html.
Chris Munford is a writer based in New Jersey. He previously held editing positions with American Metal Market, Platt’s Metals Week, and Metal Bulletin.
More cars and trucks are driving more miles every year, and truck accident fatalities are slowly rising. With driver behavior a factor in most large truck crashes, safety training can help prepare drivers for the rigors of the road.