Nashville Truck Driver Fatigue

If your car is hit by a truck in Nashville, the impact may be so forceful that you sustain immediate physical injuries. These collisions often produce serious injuries, some of which require treatment for many months or years after the crash. Thus, victims can incur costly medical bills for hospitalization, doctor visits, physical therapy, prescriptions, or other medical devices. Sometimes, injuries prevent a victim from promptly returning to work. To recover damages for medical bills, lost wages, and non-economic damages like pain and suffering, the victim will need to show the truck driver or trucking company acted negligently in causing the injuries.

Negligence can be established by demonstrating that a truck driver violated a federal safety regulation. The FMCSA regulations specifically target the issue of truck driver fatigue. While this is an issue for all drivers, it presents unique problems for commercial truck drivers who often work long shifts and travel across state lines. Fatigue can cause side effects including drowsiness, slower reaction times, and inattentiveness. Thus, truck drivers must follow specific guidelines regarding hours of service and mandatory rest breaks to ensure that they remain as alert as possible when driving. To promote compliance, truckers are required to log their shifts and driving schedules.

When a drowsy truck driver causes an accident, an experienced lawyer in the Nashville area can investigate the accident and obtain the evidence needed to prove liability. First, it is important to take steps to prevent spoliation of evidence like driver logs or black box data from the truck itself. Next, it may be necessary to immediately retain an expert to inspect the big rig and download this data, which may provide insight into driver speed and whether the trucker took evasive action, such as braking. Further, an expert familiar with trucking regulations may be retained to analyze a driver’s logs to determine whether that person complied with relevant law.