DRIVERS' FATIGUE * USA - NTSB cites fatigue in Okla. crash that killed 10

"Time to turn up the pressure on the industry and the regulator ..."

Washington,DC,USA -AP, by JOAN LOWY -28 Sept 2010: -- A tractor-trailer truck driver who slammed his rig into a line of cars stopped on a stretch of Oklahoma highway last year, killing 10 people, failed to stop because he was suffering from acute fatigue, the National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday... Board members also criticized government regulators and the trucking industry for not following safety recommendations — some of them a decade old — that investigators said could have prevented the accident... NTSB Chairman, Deborah Hersman, pointed to a recommendation the board made in 2001 that heavy trucks be equipped with warning systems that provide visual and aural alerts to drivers when their truck is within 350 feet of colliding with another vehicle... But there is no requirement that truck operators install the systems and relatively few trucks have them, they said... Similarly, the board first identified fatigue as a serious problem in heavy truck accidents 20 years ago, but safety recommendations involving driver fatigue have gone unfulfilled for more than a decade. About 31 percent of all heavy truck accidents are due to driver fatigue, investigators said... In the Oklahoma crash, the truck driver — Donald L. Creed, then 76 — most likely had only five hours of sleep before starting his workday for Kansas City-based Associated Wholesale Grocers just after 3 a.m. on June 26, 2009, investigators said... Creed was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, nor was he speeding — the speed limit on the turnpike is 75 mph. Prosecutors said his inattention caused the crash... (AP Photo/Oklahoma Highway Patrol: A Land Rover Discovery is smashed at the scene of a multiple-vehicle accident on Interstate 44 near Miami, Okla. Ten people died after a tractor-trailer slammed into a line of cars stopped by an earlier accident on June 26, 2009, along a northeast Oklahoma turnpike near Miami)