How To Find If The Driver Was Fatigued During The Accident?

Accidents involving commercial vehicle are devastating due to their sheer weight and size. Federal laws clearly prohibit high-risk driving that can lead to such terrifying crashes.

Driver fatigue remains to be one of the major causes behind these unfortunate incidents. While exhausted drivers behind the wheel are as dangerous as intoxicated drivers, it is very difficult to test fatigue unlike drugs or alcohol.

The driver’s log is the best way to discover if a driver is exhausted or not. Accurately maintained logs can reveal things like if the driver was following the driving hours limit or not, which is a crucial aspect in finding out if the driver was fatigued during the incident or not.

Even, if these logs are falsified, your truck accident injury attorney can use other techniques to find if the driver was fatigued like -

• Compare the time stamp on fuel dockets to reported locations.

• By evaluating time between fuel stops, or port of destinations considering speed limits and current road conditions.

• Searching for suspicious entries, which may include the same time recorded for port of entry logs on successive trips.

Other factors your lawyer may consider include-
 

• Over speeding is also an indicator that the driver was fatigued and wanted to arrive at the destination as early as possible.

• Accidents that occur in the afternoon could be due to all night driving or inadequate sleep, which is also associated with driver fatigue.

• It is mandatory for the truckers to maintain their driving logs that track their compliance to the rules that went into effect in July 2013.

These regulation include-

• Maximum driving hours - 70 hours a week.

• Drivers that reach the 70 hours driving mark can continue only after taking rest of 34 continuous hours.

• Trucker must take a 30 minutes break in first 8 hours of their shifts.

It is the responsibility of every truck driver to maintain an accurate driver log. However, many times they fail to maintain these logs just because of immense pressure from the employer. Nevertheless, at the end, we can say that whether it is trucking companies or drivers, all of them need to understand the importance of safety and compliance with the law.