Checklist Fatigue Part I: A so-called 'survey' puts a 30-year safe driver out of service

Checklist Fatigue Part I: A so-called 'survey' puts a 30-year safe driver out of service

by Mark H. Reddig

<Snipped for brevity>

The 30-year trucking veteran and his wife were in their Kenworth, traveling from their home in Springdale, WA, and headed to Michigan, to provide support to a sick relative, diagnosed with terminal cancer.Even though Jeanette has a CDL, she doesn’t normally run with Steve. However, because of the situation, they chose to team-drive the run. The couple was headed westbound on I-94 when they came up to the Red River Scale just inside Minnesota. They took their turn in line with the other trucks and moved forward.

And that is when it happened.“I just rolled up there, and there was a stop sign, stopped, and then I took off,” Steve said. Shortly after he started moving again, a man came running up to the rig.
“He jumped up on my truck and just started screaming at me,” Steve said. “He says, didn’t you see that stop sign? And I said, yeah, I stopped.”

Enforcement officers asked Steve to come into the scale house. They brought him into a small, windowless room. Jeanette was told she could not join him, that the officers were going to take Steve “into the back room and talk to him for a while.”

Several people from the weight station joined Steve in the room, but did not identify themselves at that time. They grabbed Steve’s logbook, they sat him down and said they just wanted to ask some questions … a survey. “I really didn’t know what was going on and they never did say what they were doing,” he said.The scale house official said “this isn’t going to take long, and it’s probably going to be no tickets.” However, for the next 45 minutes, they questioned Steve about everything from his neck size to how often he goes to the bathroom.

And at the end, they told him that even though he was just off his 10-hours rest, even though he felt fine and alert, even though his logbook showed plenty of hours to drive, they had determined he was fatigued, and put him out of service. And if his hand put the key in the ignition any time in the next 10 hours, they said, he would face a 10,000 fine … and possibly jail time.

Steve House had become a victim of the Minnesota Fatigue Questionnaire, a project promoted by an officer of a State Patrol Trooper, a list of apparently arbitrary questions that officers say determine whether a trucker is fatigued.


More at:
http://www.landlinenow.com/2009/04/checklist-fatigue-part-i-so-called_17.shtml

to sell to the states and make a bundle. The guy that dreamed this scam up is not medically qualified to make any health judgments, and they violate HIPAA every time they use the metric.

A driver can come off his mandated ten-hour break and still be put out of service, using only the opinion of the questioner to do so.

OOIDA is telling everyone to refuse to answer any health questions.

Too bad that it contradicts federal regs, and is soon going to end up in court.

Just another scam cooked up to generate revenue off truckers, who are already in one of the most regulated industries in this country.

..for Pete's sake the truckers cant even idle their trucks to keep the A/C or heater
going without risking a citation. This, while state troopers are allowed to idle their
engines near construction work zones they are parked at, not to mention the speed traps.