Provide names of other journalists involved.
Dave Wagner – anchor Carrie Hofmann – Assistant News Director Corrie Harding – News Director
List date(s) this work was published or aired.
14-Dec-11
Provide a brief synopsis of the story or stories, including any significant findings.
Driver fatigue kills more people on the highways than texting, cell phone use and all other distractions combined. Yet the underlying factors of fatigue related crashes have yet to capture the attention of the public and federal regulators. The WCNC-TV Investigative Team spent months drilling down into one cause that has received almost no national attention: sleep apnea. An estimated 13 to 20 million Americans suffer from sleep apnea and with increases in obesity which is related to the disorder, that number is climbing. Studies show drivers with sleep apnea are exponentially more likely to crash. And millions of long haul truckers are more prone to sleep apnea than the general population. The condition is imminently treatable and some large trucking companies have developed “best practices” to screen and treat sleep disorders among drivers. The results are startling: sharp reductions in preventable crashes and health care costs along with improved employee retention in a nomadic industry. But hundreds of thousands of independent truckers and their professional lobbying organization, the Owner Operators and Independent Drivers Association or OOIDA, have gone to considerable lengths to deny that fatigue in general and sleep apnea in particular are major factors in trucking fatalities. The independent drivers are aided and abetted by a poor system of record keeping by law enforcement, which ignores fatigue in most crashes, even when the cause is obvious. The result is that proposed regulations which could save lives languish in Washington while ten people a day die on the nation’s highways in large truck crashes.
Explain types of documents, data or Internet resources used. Were FOI or public records act requests required? How did this affect the work?
Lawsuits. Complete crash investigations including audio files of interviews, accident reconstruction drawings, digital photos, narratives and police reports. Joint Meeting of the Medical Review Board and the Motor Carrier Safety Advisory Committee of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. Press releases and public statements of the Owner Operators and Independent Drivers Association and articles in its trade publication Landline. Company Safety Profiles from the USDOT/FMCSA Motor Carrier Management Information System and the online searchable databases at SAFERSYS. Comments made on Facebook after news coverage of specific crashes. Online Memorials. Academic research including articles and presentations at the Sleep Apnea and Multi-Modal Transportation Conference 2011. USDOT Commercial Motor Vehicle Facts. USDOT Large Truck Crash Causation Study. FMCSA technical briefs. Youtube videos of safety presentations and congressional hearings. Vanderbilt University Television News Archives including footage and statistics produced by the Archives’ online database of network news coverage. Reports of the Government Accountability Office (GAO). Online news clips and photographs. Copies of remarks by the FMCSA administrator. Past testimony and presentations to the FMCSA and its advisory panels. Prepared comments by stakeholders including safety advocates, Teamsters, drivers groups and industry trade groups. FOI used at state level for accident reports, not at federal level. There was some expense associated with obtaining audio files and digital photographs but it was not onerous.
Explain types of human sources used.
Truckers, trucking company executives, truck safety advocates, law enforcement, witnesses, victims, attorneys, coroners, state and federal regulators.
Results:
Advisory panels to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration are drafting suggested guidelines as of this writing but the agency has yet to adopt them. Institutional inertia and political foot-dragging are a perennial problem in this area.
Follow-up (if any). Have you run a correction or clarification on the report or has anyone come forward to challenge its accuracy? If so, please explain.
.No follow up yet. Report only aired about a month ago. No corrections or clarifications.
Advice to other journalists planning a similar story or project.
Investigative reporters look for systemic problems. But these fatigue related crashes were being passed off as “isolated accidents.” After seeing the same underlying causes in crash after crash, it became less likely that the so-called “accidents” were accidental, but instead were caused by the same underlying issue: fatigue, an issue which could only be addressed once it was acknowledged.