Hours of Service Suspended

Vegetables on grocery store shelves, building materials at construction sites, Amazon boxes on doorsteps, and countless other items reach their destination thanks to trucks. Truck drivers, in turn, play an essential role in the economy, often traveling long distances on tight schedules to keep businesses supplied and consumers happy.

The prominent place trucks occupy in our everyday lives comes at an inevitable cost. More than half a million truck crashes occur in the United States every year, resulting in thousands of fatalities and hundreds of thousands of injuries.

To combat the risk of truck crashes, particularly accidents caused by driver fatigue, state and federal regulators have adopted hours of service regulations, limiting the time truckers can spend behind the wheel at a stretch, and the number of hours a trucker may drive per week. Exceeding those limits can result in a trucker losing driving privileges, imposition of fines, and other sanctions.

Occasionally, however, a truck driver continues to drive despite an hours of service suspension. This blog post explores the rules on hours of service suspensions and what happens if a suspended trucker causes a crash that harms innocent victims.

Overview of Hours of Service Regulations

Generally speaking, all truck drivers must comply with hours of service rules. The specific rules they must follow depend on whether they drive their trucks in interstate commerce (hauling cargo across state lines) or in intrastate commerce (hauling cargo only within the borders of a state).

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) establishes hours of service regulations for interstate trucking. In a nutshell, the regulations provide that interstate truckers:

• Can drive up to 11 hours a day, after 10 consecutive hours off duty;
• May not drive beyond the 14th consecutive hour after coming on duty, following 10 consecutive hours off duty.
• Must take a break lasting at least 30 minutes after 8 consecutive hours of driving.
• May not drive after 60/70 hours on duty in 7/8 consecutive days.

The rules allow for limited exceptions, such as when adverse weather conditions extend driving times, and when they drive short-haul (no more than 150-mile radius) trips.

To ensure compliance with hours of service rules, FMCSA recently adopted a rule mandating the use of electronic logging devices (ELDs) in trucks. The ELD rule aims to eliminate manual logbooks to keep track of hours of service, making compliance with those important safety rules easier to monitor and enforce.

State trucking regulators establish hours of service regulations for intrastate trucking within their borders. Many states’ regulations essentially mirror the FMCSA’s interstate hours of service rules. However, some states (such as Florida) have adopted more lenient rules, allowing truckers to spend longer periods driving.

Why Are Hours of Service Regulations So Important? It’s All About Driver Fatigue.

At first blush, the rules above seem like they could be somewhat confusing to follow and easy to break by mistake. Drivers and trucking companies undoubtedly feel burdened by them. And, by limiting driver hours, they inevitably act as a drag on commerce, which has a real economic impact in terms of the availability of goods and materials, and the prices we pay for them.

So, why have trucking hours of service rules? The answer boils down to two words: driver fatigue.

Several years ago, The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine prepared a comprehensive report on the problem of fatigue among truck drivers on the nation’s roads, titled Commercial Motor Vehicle Driver Fatigue, Long-Term Health, and Highway Safety. It contained some alarming findings, including that an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the 4,000+ fatalities in truck accidents happen because of trucker fatigue. The report also collected and summarized a large body of research showing that America’s truckers are chronically sleep-deprived, and that they get poor quality sleep due to (among other factors) relatively poor health, stressful jobs, and working long, irregular hours.

To read the report is to conclude that whenever you encounter a large truck on the road, especially at night, chances are the driver behind the wheel is operating on less-than-optimal sleep. That means the driver runs an elevated risk of suffering from slowed reaction times, impaired visual and situational awareness, and difficulty keeping the truck traveling at a safe speed and direction.

Truck driver fatigue, in other words, puts everyone at risk of deadly truck accidents. Hours of service rules, while imperfect, seek to combat fatigue by imposing broad limits on trucker and trucking company behavior. The regulations do not, and cannot hope to, eliminate truck driver fatigue. So long as truckers take to the road at odd hours on tight schedules, they will get drowsy behind the wheel. However, enforcing compliance with hours of service rules can help to reduce the number of tragic truck accidents that cause massive physical, emotional, and financial harm to individuals and communities alike.

Hours of Service Violations and Their Consequences

Truck drivers and trucking companies face serious consequences for violating hours of service rules. Here is an overview.

Out-of-Service Orders

A truck driver found to have violated hours of service regulations will be declared out-of-service, and may not drive a commercial motor vehicle until the violation can be remedied and the driver can lawfully drive again. Regulations also bar a trucking company from allowing or requiring a driver who has been declared out-of-service to get behind the wheel of a truck until the violation has been remedied and the driver can lawfully drive.

So, for example, if an official inspector discovers that a truck driver has been driving for 18 hours straight, then the driver can be ordered out-of-service and must wait a minimum of 10 hours off-duty before returning to the road. Similarly, a driver who has driven more than the maximum 60 to 70 hours over a seven- or eight-day period will be ordered out-of-service until a minimum off-duty period of 34 hours has expired.

Serious hours of service violations also subject drivers and trucking companies to potential fines. FMCA’s rules provide that a truck driver “who exceeds, and a motor carrier that requires or permits a driver to exceed” an hour of service limit by more than 3 hours (subject to any applicable exceptions) will be deemed to have committed an “egregious violation of driving limits”. Drivers found guilty of an egregious violation by the FMCSA face a fine of up to $2,500 for each offense, and trucking companies face a fine of up to $10,000 per offense.

Penalties for Violating Hours of Service Orders

Stiffer potential sanctions follow a violation of an out-of-service order for breaking hours of service rules.

Under FMCSA regulations, a truck driver who operates a truck during any time when he has been declared out-of-service will be disqualified (i.e., suspended) from driving. The duration of the disqualification depends on the number of out-of-service violations the driver has committed.

• For a first offense, the driver is disqualified no less than 180 days and no more than 1 year.
• For a second offense, no less than 2 years and no more than 5 years.
• For a third or subsequent offense, no less than 3 years and no more than 5 years.

Drivers who operate a truck loaded with hazardous materials in violation of an out-of-service order may face even longer periods of disqualification.

In addition to disqualification from driving, FMCSA regulations also impose potentially hefty fines on drivers who violate an out-of-service order, and on trucking companies that permit or require drivers to do so. The fine for a truck driver is up to $1,951 per violation. The fine for a trucking company is up to $19,505 per violation.

Finally, truck drivers who violate out-of-service orders may also receive points on or suspension of their commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) under the licensing laws of the states that issue them. Driving on a suspended CDL also constitutes a violation of FMCSA trucking regulations, which may also result in further disqualification and fines for truck drivers and their employers.

Intrastate trucking regulations generally contain similar periods of suspension and fines for violation of their provisions.

Suspended Drivers Still Cause Accidents

The rules and penalties described above can help to curb the worst driver behavior, but they are not foolproof. The nation has exponentially more trucks and truckers than it has trucking safety regulators. Truckers and trucking companies may decide to violate hours of service rules and out-of-service orders because they decide the economic benefit of the violation outweighs the risk of getting caught. (This is why the FMCSA has adopted ELD rules—it is believed ELDs make it harder for the trucking industry to get away with violations.)

Truckers and trucking companies that break the rules put everyone on the road at risk of tragedy. Inevitably, accidents involving out-of-service drivers will occur, and they will cause injuries and the senseless loss of life.

Compensation for Victims of Suspended Trucker Accidents

Victims of truck crashes caused by suspended (out-of-service) truck drivers have legal rights to receive compensation for their injuries and losses.

Generally speaking, the law treats any violation of an hour of service rule or out-of-service order as evidence of a driver’s negligence—a violation of the basic duty of care each-and-every one of us owes to others not to engage in unreasonably dangerous, harmful conduct. A truck driver whose negligent actions cause a crash will generally owe money damages to accident victims. The driver’s employer will generally also have legal liability for money damages to victims of crashes caused by their drivers’ hours of service and out-of-service order violations. By law, trucking companies usually must answer for their drivers’ wrongful conduct. In addition, companies that know about, or even require, the violations by their drivers have themselves engaged in wrongful conduct that creates legal liability for a crash.

Truck accident victims can retain experienced truck accident lawyers to represent them after truckers and trucking companies cause accidents through hours of service and out-of-service order violations. The lawyers can investigate the accident, identify the truckers and trucking companies who may owe damages, and prepare, file, and litigate legal actions (usually, insurance claims and lawsuits) demanding payment for the harm victims suffered.

In a legal action for damages caused by a trucking accident, victims can often seek compensation for:

• Past and future medical expenses related to the treatment of crash-related injuries.
• Non-medical expenses caused by the crash and injuries, such as those relating to property damage caused by the crash, and out-of-pocket costs victims would not have had if the truck accident hadn’t happened.
• Past and future loss of wages and income, resulting from victims missing work or becoming disabled.
• Pain, suffering, and diminished quality of life owing to the truck crash and the injuries it caused.

Courts may also order truckers and trucking companies whose violations of regulations reflect extreme or intentional conduct to pay punitive damages, as punishment for their conduct.

If a truck accident results in a tragic loss of life, then the deceased victims’ families can often also seek compensation for their losses through a wrongful death lawsuit.

Why It’s Important to Hire a Truck Accident Lawyer

To obtain maximum compensation for injuries and losses caused by a truck accident, victims should always seek to retain a lawyer who has years of experience and a track record of success in truck accident cases, specifically. It will not do to hire any personal injury lawyer. Victims need a truck accident lawyer.

Here’s why.

Truck accidents differ from run-of-the-mill motor vehicle accidents. They tend to cause greater amounts of damage, to more victims, than a car crash, for instance. They involve commercial vehicles, which means they often affect the legal and financial interests of multiple businesses, each of which may face liability and will try hard to avoid it.

Finally, as we’ve been discussing above, truck accidents implicate complicated trucking regulations. Finding a violation of an hours of service regulation or, even more so, an out-of-service order, at the root of a crash can help prove a trucker’s or trucking company’s liability for maximum damages.

It takes familiarity with the trucking industry and its rules to perform an adequate investigation of a truck accident, and to hold truckers and trucking companies accountable for their misdeeds. Truck accident lawyers have that level of familiarity with the law and regulations. Other lawyers may not.

Contact an experienced trucking accident injury lawyer today to learn more about proving that a trucker violating an hours of service suspension caused an accident that harmed you or a loved one.