The FMCSA ordered the immediate shutdown of carrier DND International after an investigation found serious and widespread safety violations. The investigation was prompted by an accident in January where one of the company’s drivers crashed into an Illinois State Police cruiser and a highway maintenance vehicle, killing a tollway worker and injuring the state trooper who is still in intensive care.
According to the out-of-service order, in addition to being an imminent hazard to public safety, the company had an “unmistakable, dangerous pattern of serious falsification” of drivers’ logbooks which allowed drivers to far exceed the allowable hours of service. According to the team prosecuting the driver, he had been working for 36 hours with a break of only 3.5 hours leading up to the accident.
The pattern of drivers going over hours was a combined result of a “reckless disregard” for the rules and an “entirely ineffective” disciplinary process – a process which in reality wa only a message sent to the drivers that told them not to get caught.
Surprisingly, even after the accident, a compliance review in late March found that DND’s safety status should only be downgraded to “conditional” and they were allowed to keep operating until the out-of-service order was issued on Tuesday.
According to a lawyer for DND, the company has already taken steps to address safety issues and is planning to ask for permission to continue operating.
Next Story: OOIDA To Fight For Driver Trainer Certifications, FMCSA Reviews
Source: chicagotribune, seattlepi, overdrive
Used to calls these kinds of companies “fly by night” for their inability to hire quality people, follow rules and regulations. Now it takes a death of somebody to wake people up in government to do something. If your going to have government regulations and agencies meant to provide a safety net for American’s. At the very least they could do would be proactive, not reactive to these problems. Otherwise, they are very much worthless to us and the general public. Personally, I would require any company who has had this kind of blatant problem with HOS, equipment and fatality accident. To be required to have EOBR in all trucks and be given a reevaluation every quarter until a significant time has established a better pattern of safety.
I drive past a shipper for this company where they park all there trucks and yesterday I saw about 15-20 drivers all standing around by the trucks just BSing. This place deserves it after what there driver did only a few months ago!
LMAO! That “serious pattern of falsification” is going on at 2/3 of the carriers everywhere. What a joke.
“he had been working for 36 hours with a break of only 3.5 hours”
That doesn’t sound like a joke to me, and it isn’t common. The driver got into an accident that killed 1 person and critically injured another. They’re going to throw the book at the driver, and I hope the carrier gets the same treatment for encouraging that behavior.
Mandatory ELDs are going to create a lot of problems. Maybe they’ll have the upside of flagging out-of-control carriers so they can be shut down before they cause more preventable tragedies like this one.
Ah, a perfect example of the true purpose of the HOS regulations: Since the highway system is one of the deadliest, if not THE deadliest invention of all time, with ghastly, family-devastating crashes occurring on a regular basis, scapegoating is inevitable – and who better than the lowly truck driver?
What do you mean “the highway system is one of the deadliest, if not THE deadliest invention of all time”? That makes no sense. Let’s eliminate that highway system and see if human mortality rates go down or up. You have to calculate the lives lost vs. the benefit gained such as improved nutrition and medical care. And who is scapegoating “the lowly truck driver” in this story? Seems they caught a driver and a company in flagrant violation of any kind of safety standards. That’s not scapegoating. Ummm, I’m guessing you flunked Logic 101.
this is terrible, and i know for a fact the the log personcan change any electronic logs from there desk I know the company i workd for Chizek transport change my logs sothat i can have hours
This is sad but true and this happens all the time in the 90 % of the trucking companies, thing is drivers are being pushed more and more for such log book manipulations because the company where he works made him, i think highway system and the carrier companies needs to be straightened up with better rules and regulations.