HEAVY TRUCKS

Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. The IRE Journal, Nov/Dec 2004 by Chase, Marc

Database shows staggering safety violations contributing to crashes and highway fatalities

Every day, residents of Northwest Indiana share the roadways with tens of thousands of tractor-trailers and other heavy trucks as they drive to work, take their children to school and head home. Loaded rigs weighing 80,000 pounds often mingle bumper to bumper with 4,000-pound family cars along the interstates and state highways of the Gary region, just south of Chicago.

The readership area of The Times of Northwest Indiana is one of the heaviest-traveled thoroughfares in the country. Thousands of the semitrailers on our roadways haul loads for the more than 4,000 heavy-truck companies based in the region. Many of them haul 40,000-pound steel coils produced by our region's main industry. Heavy trucks are involved in some sort of collisions on our roadways every day.

Given all of those facts, we decided to lind out the safety records of our region's trucking companies and the preparedness of our state police in looking for, and catching, heavy-truck violations on our roads. We started by purchasing the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or PMCSA, truck census database from IRE. The database contains the names, identification numbers and fleet sizes of companies throughout the country that operate vehicles in excess of 10,000 pounds, including semis and buses.

Using different tools

Queries in Microsoft Access helped extract all heavy-truck carriers operating out of the Indiana and Illinois cities in our readership area. We then broke all regional carriers off into an Access table and then into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for further analysis. A sort of the companies' listed number of power units helped us identify the 100 largest heavy-truck carriers operating out of our region.

Because the truck census data was last updated in 2002, we next had to verify that each of the 100 companies remained open for business. Telephone calls were placed to all of the companies and checks were made of an online federal search engine to verify this. Defunct companies were removed from the list of 100, and previously smaller companies from the census were moved up to take their places on our list.

Once our list of 100 was clean and verified, we wanted to find all safety information we could on each of the largest carriers. Wc began by running them all through the FMCSA's Safer and SafeStat systems. Both systems allow online snapshots of a carrier's safety history within the most recent 24-month period and assign scores based on the carriers' performances during roadside and wcigh-station safety inspections.

The SafeStat system has taken some criticism from the trucking industry for being incomplete because of inconsistent reporting methods across the 50 states, but it did give us a starting point for which carriers to explore. The searches showed us that 26 of the region's 100 largest trucking companies had been flagged for inspection by the federal government because of a history of safety violations - largely for faulty brakes and heavy loads not properly secured. Most of those 26 companies were flat-bed steel haulers, handling some of the heaviest and most unwieldy loads on the roadways.

We then expanded our reviews of the 26 flagged companies beyond the Safer and SafeStat checks, using two different tools.

First, we ran each of the flagged companies through Access queries of the federal heavy-truck crash file, also available through IRE. The checks showed that between 1990 and 2001, nearly 600 trucks being operated by those companies were involved in crashes resulting in 477 injuries and 29 deaths.

Second, we culled the most recent 30 months worth of inspection results for each company nationwide, including safety violations that took drivers and their trucks out of service and traffic violations that led to inspections. The information is available online at the FMCSA Web site and is searchable using the Department of Transportation numbers of individual heavy-truck carriers. Those numbers are provided in the truck census file. The results for the 26 carriers were staggering. Of 2,864 inspections, trucks were pulled out of service 1,024 times for safety violations, an out-of-service rate considerably higher than the national average.

Human elements

We had our numbers and the records to back them up. Now we needed our color. Interviews and visits to the handful of carriers who would let us in revealed a mixed bag. Some were legitimately trying to improve their safety records by firing unsafe driving contractors and working with the state police to educate their drivers on safety violations. Others complained of an "unfair" federal system targeting them for no good reason.

Research of our archives, the crash file and tips from local police and accident attorneys led us to the subjects of our second day of coverage: the survivors and families of those killed in heavy-truck crashes.

Searches through hundreds of crash reports led us to a family who had recently lost a husband and father, a woman who lost her teenage daughter and a truck driver taken out of service for safety violations in Northwest Indiana - who four months later blew a Pennsylvania stop sign, killing a family of five. All of these stories gave us the human elements for the issue of truck safety.