Truck Injury Lawyer Blog : Truck Accident Lawyer & Attorney: Morgan Adams : Contingency Fee Truck Accident Lawyer

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration Tuesday announced its final hours of service rule, and it remains unchanged from the "interim" rule the trucking industry has been working under after the DC Court of Appeals struck down a similar HOS rule. (See my earlier blog posts on this topic.)

Truck drivers are limited to driving for only 11 hours and working for no more than 14 hours each day. The prior rule limited drivers to 10 hours of driving. This is one of the most frequently violated rules in the trucking industry. The driver's logs, which are supposed to record how the driver spends his time behind the wheel, are frequently called "comic books" in the industry because they are so often faked.

The rule will become effective Jan. 19, 2009, the day before the current administration leaves office.

Public Citizen has been fighting the rule in court since it was first announced in 2005.

In July 2007, the court remanded the Hours of Service rules to FMCSA, ruling that the agency must provide better explanations of its justifications for adopting the 11-hour drive time and 34-hour restart provisions of the rule. In December, FMCSA announced that it was keeping the 11-hour and the 34-hour provisions in an Interim Final Rule. In January, a federal appeals court denied Public Citizen's request to invalidate the Interim Final Rule.

Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook issued a statement denouncing the rule, saying, "FMCSA's rule, which ignores mountains of safety research, authorizes the exact same 11-hours of driving and 34-hour restart provisions of rules past - rules that the court deemed were inadequate. Under the rule, drivers may continue to log a physically and mentally demanding 77 hours behind the wheel in a seven-day period, take a mere 34 hours off, then hit the road to do it all over. In addition, drivers can be required to work 14 hours a day, which includes loading and unloading cargo. The rule also fails to require electronic on-board recorders that are essential to assure effective enforcement of the rule." See:  www.citizen.org/pressroom/release.cfm

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Once again the failure to have seat belts on school buses has resulted in injuries to our children. In this Nov 12, 2008, wreck involving Whitwell Elementary School students I believe many of the injuries could have been prevented if only there were seat belts on the bus. I have blogged on this topic in the past.

I believe the school board and the government has responsibility for these injuries by allowing a school bus on the roads without seat belts.

Liability will be determined with the help of a DriveCam video the Tennessee Highway Patrol is evaluating. You can see my earlier posts on DriveCam for more about this system. Essentially the system preserves a video clip of a few seconds before the wreck and a few seconds after the wreck.

I would encourage the families with seriously injured children involved in this tragedy to contact a lawyer that can adequately investigate and pursue the various claims and parties involved. Given significant enough injuries potential defendants would include the the drivers (apparently there was a small pickup that may have contributed to the wreck), the bus manufacturer, the operating company (probably Laidlaw as they currently have the DriveCam system installed on the school buses they operate); and the government.

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Recently the American Association For Justice published an article entitled Tricks of the Trade: How Insurance Companies Deny, Delay, Confuse and Refuse . The article goes over methods insurance companies use to cheat consumers out of BILLIONS of dollars annually. You need to read this article to protect yourself from insurance companies and know when you are being mistreated in the claims handling process.

The article does not delve into one of the most common ways consumers are ripped off from insurance companies. What is this? Let me tell you.

I routinely have clients that say that they were treated "fairly" by the adjuster because their "car was fixed." Actually this is one of the biggest ripoffs and one of the first ways you can tell the insurance adjuster is not your friend. You see the insurance company failed to pay you for the depreciation on your car.

What is depreciation? It is the fact that you had a car that was unwrecked, that is now wrecked, and a wrecked car is not worth as much as an unwrecked car even if perfectly repaired. When you go to sell your car no one will take the risk of buying a wrecked car if they can by a similar car that was never wrecked. The only way to entice a buyer to purchase the wrecked car is to lower the price below that of an unwrecked car. In Tennessee you have been able to recover the depreciation of your wrecked car for decades, at least since 1985. THE INSURANCE COMPANY ADJUSTERS KNOW THIS IS THE LAW. DID THEY TELL YOU?

The leading case in Tennessee on depreciation is: Senter v. TN Farmers Mutual Ins. Co., 702 S.W.2d 175 (TN. App. 1985) The case states that the value of a car after a wreck is based on three factors: 1) function 2) appearance and 3) value. Function and appearance may be determined by the cost of repairs. Value, however, must also consider the fact that a car that is wrecked is not worth as much as a car that has never been wrecked. (The case suggests a 15% decrease in value from book value but the actual amount will vary from car to car and there is no set value.)

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Swift will test its drivers for sleep apnea in a new program to detect and treat this chronic problem in the trucking industry. An estimated 25% of drivers have sleep apnea, a subject  I have blogged about before (see July 28, 2008).

With untreated sleep apnea a driver wakes up repeatedly during the night, disrupting his sleep, and causing him to be fatigued and more likely to make a mistake throughout the day. A driver is not allowed to drive a tractor trailer if he has untreated sleep apnea, a reason many drivers fail to seek out diagnosis and treatment, and why so many substandard trucking companies turn a blind eye to the condition.

Swift is following Schneider National in testing for sleep apnea.

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I have discussed the hours of service regulations extensively in prior posts. It is my position, and I believe most non-industry safety professional that drivers are on the road too many hours of the day, resulting in needless and preventable accidents.

The FMCSA has sent the new HOS rule to the White House for review. While it typically uses the 90 days alloted to it to make a decision (which would have the decision out Jan 19th, one day before the next president is sworn in), the White House has promised to expedite matters and have a decision out this year.

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