NEWBIES......Driving Fatigued!!!!

Thanks . Yeah , that happens . That's what it was with that WalMart driver that killed the kids whose parents founded PATT . He had been up all day before starting a night shift . There is no way to regulate rest .

 

You would think truck companies would have learned this by now. The FMCSA clearly talks about circadian clock. Yet companies will have a driver sleep all night, get up at 6 am delivery and then tell them to go back to bed because the load does not load till 10 pm and they have to drive all night.

 

Well we are dispatched from our warehouse to our customer with enough time to get to destination and take a 10 hr break. deliver early morning and get reloaded then whatever the rest of our load entails. The problem starts when your load is late or held up for whatever reason leaving the warehouse then you are automatically behind schedule so you have to improvise, not saying run illegal but change the way you will run your entire route and run. We had a driver that works for us load was late he had to drive all night to get to his appt on time. He fell asleep hit a car and a bridge and he was killed. He had been off for 2 days over the weekend had his 34 hr restart and he was 100% legal on his logs but was very unforunate. It is a shame but it happens. Don't chance it folks if you're tired get some sleep. I would much rather get stuck on the road an extra day or be short on my check bbecause i was late and got held up than kill myself or someone else.

 

I told the company I was tired because of the way the load was working. They said it was not their problem. I was "off" for 10 hours so I was to drive my 11. Not their problem I could not get up after 10 hour break and go right back to bed for another 14 hours.

 

In that case as i have stated before you are the boss. what i would have done is drive till i got tired and stopped to sleep then got their when i got their. But we can all say what we would or would not do. We just need to stand up for ourselves more. Once i am gone from the yard they are not going to take the load away from me. They might get pissed off cause i'm late but as soon as my safety director finds out that they gave me ##### for being late cause i stopped to sleep he will put an end to that. I really do work for the exception to the rule compared to most of you these days. I feel sorry for those of you that deal with these ignorant inconsiderate dispatchers and such.

 

We are also supposed to be loaded in time to take a 10 hour break before delivery . They know if it's shipped late it'll be delivered late . That simple . No way am I going to unload after only a 6 or 7 hour break and then have to take a break after unloading .

 

I called them and told them to get a load back to the yard. They asked why and I told them I was cleaning the truck out. Never did the illegal run.

They actually wanted me to run all night and be at the dock at 7 in the morning and get unloaded at a grocery warehouse. After empty they would then send me for a reload and have me loaded and all during my break so I could run all night refreshed.

Cleaned the truck out at 5:30 that night and walked away.

 

This is was really irritates me about my husbands employer...they will call him at 6 pm telling him he will have to leave around 11 pm to drop off a load. Then he will have to stop whatever he is doing (and hope he didn't work too hard around the house) and get some sleep so he's ready to leave at that time. Since there aren't many loads right now he has to take what he can get but it sure makes a wife worry!!

 

I know I was guilty more than once of leaving the house too late on a Sunday afternoon or evening, then having to catnap on the way, only to get up before dawn and fight that awful drowziness. I've scared myself more than once.

However, I've been a CPAP user for almost two years now, and I understand why I felt that way. I probably hadn't had a truly good, restful night of sleep in over 20 years, given the degree of sleep apnea I suffer from.

I can now honestly say that since I've used the machine (I've missed one day the entire time), I've not had a single fatigue-induced nap. Oh, I've been tired, but no where near the level of what I described above.

 

Doesn't The FMC state :"no company shall force a driver to drive a load he feels is unsafe due to load, truck, weather conditions or fatique"? That's a rough paraphase but (I believe) fairly accurate. I've used that on Swift a couple time and they've run for the hills.