Killer Trucks – Why the Slaughter Won't Stop
Big rigs aren't required to have the safest brakes available
Plain Dealer – March 2, 1993
SERIES: DEADLY DELAYS – RED TAPE COSTS LIVES
THIRD OF A SERIES
by Keith C. Epstein
PLAIN DEALER REPORTER
LAUGHLINTOWN, PA.
That tranquil spring morning in 1989, neighbors eased into their usual rhythms.
Jack Steitz, owner of the local inn, emerged on an errand. Soon another car started up the road – Walter Lepley, his wife and a friend, heading for the only shopping center in town.
Suddenly, from behind Lepley’s car, a 27-ton truck bound for Ohio roared down the highway, its horns blaring and headlights flashing.
Donnie Frey’s rig was hauling 60,000 pounds of machinery and he had no brakes.
It all happened in front of Steitz. He heard the rumble. He saw the 18-wheeler approach the Lepleys’ Ford LTD from behind, heard the screams as the truck slammed into the car. It snapped telephone poles and trees, demolished a house, and exploded, leaving Main Street littered with blood, limbs and metal.
“I saw pieces of bodies everywhere,” recalls Steitz.
There were five dead: Frey, a companion in the truck, the Lepleys and their friend.
Later that summer, as 13-year-old Lindsey Lindgren and her parents drove home through southern Georgia, a truck carrying propane jackknifed, slamming into the family car. Only Lindsey survived. She pulled her dead mother out of the car.
Once again, bad brakes.
A month later, Ray Alan Fank, hauling 7,650 gallons of gasoline, had just picked up the bypass around a small Iowa town when a car stopped less than 100 feet in front of his rig. Nearby, children played in a schoolyard. He slammed on the brakes – avoiding both the car and the children.
Reason: His heavy truck was among the few in the United States equipped with anti-lock brakes. “Not a typical truck by today’s standards,” observed the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
Despite such evidence, the agency has refused for 14 years to require anti-lock or self-adjusting brakes for heavy trucks, another example of the deadly cost of bureaucratic delay.
Government studies blame brakes for one in every three heavy-truck crashes, but Washington has failed to require proven solutions. Experts say two devices would make trucks safer – anti-lock brakes and self-adjusting brakes.
Yet Washington has failed to act despite the most grisly evidence of all: Nearly 2,800 of accidents with similar causes – bad brakes – occur each year.
The highway agency cited the Iowa near-accident as “a dramatic example of the principal benefit to be gained by … anti-lock brakes.” The agency credited Ray Alan Fank’s anti-locks with sparing at least two lives and averting disaster in the schoolyard.
“The technology works,” agreed the American Trucking Associations. “It will save lives.”
Yet while anti-locks are standard equipment on many new cars, they still are rare where most needed – in heavy rigs. Price tag: Around $3,000. Most big trucks cost about $100,000.
Yet, the government refused until last year even to consider requiring self-adjusting brakes, and at $204, they are far cheaper than anti-locks. While most car brakes are self-adjusting, the government’s new rules requiring them only on new trucks won’t take effect until late 1994.
By then, brake-related truck accidents will result in at least $720 million in medical costs, liability and property damage, while killing 204 people and injuring 2,400, National Transportation Safety Board estimates show.
“It’s a scandal,” said Brian O’Neill, president of a coalition of insurers. “Here’s an issue if there ever was one to go somewhere. The media have for years savaged trucks on safety problems. The public hates big trucks. The evidence is there.
“But still the regulatory process fails. As a result, we’re paying an awfully big price for moving goods around. In airplanes, we’d never accept the same death toll.”
By preventing wheels from locking, anti-locks give extra protection in sudden stops – vehicles are less prone to skidding or jackknifing. Adjusters meet the problem of failing to regularly check brakes.
Manufacturers recognized the drawbacks of truck brakes in the 1960s, offering automatic brake adjusters for the first time.
In 1978, the safety board first urged the highway agency to create rules to “ensure brakes being in proper adjustment at all times.”
Even then, the safety board noticed “runaway” trucks, like the huge rig that rumbled into Laughlintown, kept flying out of control. The toll included five runaways in which 24 people died and 38 were injured.
Federal safety officials knew few drivers or truck owners regularly checked brakes. “Industry cannot be relied upon to implement the … routine maintenance … necessary to detect and correct maladjusted brakes,” the safety board said.
Nor could truckers on the road tell, from the feel of the brakes alone, when they were out of adjustment.
So the safety board urged self-adjusting brakes.
By seizing on the issue in 1978, the safety board realized its legal responsibility – to “reduce the likelihood of recurrence of transportation accidents.”
It failed because, as a paper tiger, the National Transportation Safety Board has no power to make rules. It can only suggest remedies. Another agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has the power to act on those suggestions, and it has been slow to move against the trucking industry.
Congress has been slow, too, repeatedly failing to nudge NHTSA to make new rules.
Since 1988, trucking interests have given $140,750 to 36 members of the House surface transportation subcommittee, which oversees regulators of the trucking industry, according to a computer analysis for this series by the National Library on Money & Politics.
The American Trucking Associations’ $30 million annual budget is nearly as much as the safety board’s. For years it has argued that the technology didn’t work. “It simply wasn’t effective,” said spokesman John Doyle. “Police radar signals would lock truckers’ brakes for no reason.”
While a few members of Congress, unafraid of clashing with the truck lobby, pressed for action in the 1970s, the highway agency lengthened rather than shortened standards for minimum stopping distances for trucks.
Yet the highway agency’s lethargy over the years – on virtually everything it contemplates – has more to do with an old court victory for trucking interests than the industry’s influence in Congress.
In 1978, after NHTSA adopted new standards, an appeals court ruled that the agency had acted without sufficient proof the anti-locks worked. But the court agreed with the pressing need for safety improvements.
Today, that lawsuit and the well-financed industry lawyers behind it remain the prime reason for the government’s delay in making trucks safer.
With the greater burden of proof and new fear of being sued, bureaucrats were forced to prepare a full legal defense before requiring anything. The effectiveness of anti-locks, however evident to the experts, was not clear enough for agency lawyers.
“The legal culture dictates what we do,” says Barry Felrice, the agency’s chief rule maker. “The agency got gun-shy.”
Study after study in the United States and Germany confirmed the risks would be significantly less if anti-locks were required. Moreover, many European truckers have used anti-locks for a decade; a little more than a year ago, most of Europe required them. Result: Jackknifing has been all but eliminated, transportation studies show.
In 1988 – a decade after first urging the NHTSA to “ensure brakes … in proper adjustment” – NTSB officials again pleaded with the highway agency to require automatic adjusters.
Following a congressional examination of the 1989 Laughlintown crash and similar accidents, the Senate’s Transportation Committee – 11 years after the safety board’s first recommendation – joined the chorus of pleas for tougher brake standards.
Writing the highway agency shortly before his own death, Pennsylvania Sen. John Heinz, referring to the Laughlintown crash, urged immediate action.
“There is a … horrific price to be paid for years of delay,” Heinz said.
That was two years ago.
One month after Lindsey Lindren lost her parents in Georgia, Ray Alan Fank almost certainly avoided a crash near the school in Greene, Iowa. Without anti-locks, the highway agency acknowledged, both he and the driver of a Chevy probably would have died.
His rig is among 200 trucks equipped with anti-lock brakes, as a multiyear experiment by the highway agency. In a report, agency officials claimed that results had been “generally positive.”
Yet it has no plans to require them. Tests will continue well into this year.
Experienced agency hands call it building up the evidence.
Finally, in late 1991, Congress – in an amendment to a highway funding bill – seemed to force the highway agency to move. Trucking associations, General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. all seemed to agree: It was time to come up with some requirements.
Yet Congress chose language ordering the agency only to “examine methods for improving brake performance,” including anti-locks – studies already going on for years.
Last Tuesday, the American Trucking Associations itself finally decided to push for antilocks on new trucks – by 1999.
“Now, they’re safe,” said the organization’s Doyle. “Fortunately, the federal government moves slowly because they want to get it right first.”
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Other stories from this series:
Deadly Delays: Bureaucracy is Killing Us – Long after wreckage is examined for clues, causes determined, and solutions urged – thousands of Americans still risk death or injury in similar accidents. (The Plain Dealer)
Ice on Jets – Recurring Risk, Tolerated for Years – Despite pinpointing causes of multiple commercial airliner crashes, Washington does nothing to require simple, proven remedies advocated for years
Flight 405: The Story of Four Passengers- Strangers on a plane, going about the routine business of flying, trusted that commercial aviation had become as safe as airlines and the government could make it. They were wrong.
Killer Trucks – Why the Slaughter Won’t Stop – Trucks with self-adjusting brakes would have fewer accidents, causing less damage and saving hundreds of lives. Yet the government dawdled in requiring them.
While Grownups Squabbled, Children Died – Battles between automakers and regulators for more than a decade stalled development of safer child seats.
Feds Shrug Off a Life-Saver for Commuter Planes – Commuter airline flights crashed repeatedly into the ground for lack of a simple device urged for years by federal safety officials. The FAA declined. Planes kept crashing.
Cessnas Crash, but Agencies Do Nothing - For decades, Cessnas chocked from a carburetor flaw known to the manufacturer and the government. Yet pilots had never heard of the problem, and the government required no fix.
Yellow Coffins – Modern school buses are among the safest means of transport. Yet when accidents occur, children are often trapped. Still, the government for years allowed preventable tragedies to recur.
Safety Board Has No Teeth – The National Transportation Safety Board is widely known for investigating accidents. What many people don’t realize is that it’s powerless – a toothless tiger.
