Earlier today, I was looking at a family history book my uncle wrote about my family and noticed a chapter about my grandpa and grandma’s 50th Anniversary Celebration on the Fourth of July in 1968. It just so happened that we were also celebrating my mom and dad’s 25th Anniversary on the same day. My uncle was recalling that day and how the younger generation frolicked about “unaware of the historic nature of the occasion.” How true.
The celebration was at my aunt and uncle’s farm which used to be the farm where my grandma had grown up. “Countless family gatherings had taken place [there for] over nearly 70 years”: marriages; births; deaths; and funerals. And when the expressway came through not too many years later, it would all disappear.
And yet, my uncle reflected, “when you look back on the long history of our forebears you see that it was just such thrusts of events that moved us to where we are today. . . There is only one certainty: Tempus edax rerum. ‘Time devours all things.'”
And that reminded me of the poem which AnnaLeah wrote when she was 12. I wondered whether she had read her Great Uncle Dan Waldron’s book and been inspired by it to write her poem, Time.
We are thankful for everyone who has signed the Vision Zero Petition. And certainly your signature is enough, but I wanted to share the comments which I have found on The Petition Site from those who have signed our petition:
Michelle Novak, NY Another family member whose deceased 22 year-old nephew’s life was weighed against a load of cookies and found lacking. We have had enough. You can stop this. But your political will seems to always lose to the monetary will of those executives and shareholders in the industry. Oh, if you could feel shame…..or empathy.
David M. Dunn, MI
Seriously? Putting profit before human life is short term thinking and, by the way, immoral.
Ed Slattery, MD
My wife was killed and two sons seriously injured, one permanently, when a trucker fell asleep at the wheel and pushed their car under the rear end of another semi in front of them while coming into a construction zone.
Sonya Silver, NC
Everyone’s life is priceless. So is the unconditional love that we express to our loved ones. So we need to make a change and to anyone denying us to do so need to ask themselves how much is their families worth?
Ryan McMahan, NC
I work in the accident reconstruction industry and see countless underride accidents each year, many ending in serious injury or death. The severity of injury in these types of crashes could be significantly reduced with the simple implementation of additional bracing on the trailers that travel our roadways.
Brie Handgraaf, NC
The bottom line should NEVER outweigh the cost of a human life. The status quo needs to be changed before anyone else suffers such a tragedy as the Karths.
Rebekah Black, TX
Please adopt stronger safety rules so that more lives can be saved. My sisters AnnaLeah and Mary Lydia are gone forever due to a truck collision, and no other family should have to go through this. Save lives.
Name not displayed, IL
I worry every day about my children’s safety.
Marianne Karth, NC
There is no one that this does not potentially impact in some way. We are asking for bold and decisive action to reduce tragic, preventable crash fatalities. Don’t wait until it touches you personally to move heaven & earth to identify and require the best possible protection. Once a loved one becomes a motor vehicle crash statistic, it will be too late–they will not come back to you.
Janet Watson, NC
I have good friends who lost 2 beautiful daughters in a horrific truck underride accident that could have been prevented with tougher trucking laws. Please sign this petition to help make a change in regulations that will help prevent more deaths on the road.
Name not displayed, IL
I always want to avert my eyes when I see the highway billboards that announce the number of traffic death to date in Illinois, but I make myself look to remind myself and my kids to drive safely and defensively. The numbers are staggering and devastating.
Sherri Gillespie, CA
OMB & DOT 1. Adopt rational Vision Zero Safety strategy. 2. Apply Vision Zero principles initiating rulemaking to require forward collision avoidance.
Lana Briscoe, NY
Secretary Foxx, it is avoidable and inexcusable that about 40,000 Americans die in vehicular crashes every year. Stop the cost/benefit analysis bean counting. The lives of Americans are at stake.
Lucy Schneider, NJ
This is a horrific tragedy that could have been prevented. I urge the Department of Transportation to adopt a VISION ZERO Policy!
Jeanette Naumann, TX
I was with members of this family when they suffered the tragic loss of their sisters and daughters. No parent should have to go through this when it can be prevented.
Keith C Schnip, WA
Big trucks, i.e. 18 wheelers, etc. should be banned from the nation’s Interstate Highway System. They cannot coexist safely with regular automotive traffic, i.e. cars. The roads simply are not big enough or safe enough.
Name not displayed, CA
Bring back freight trains! Lessen roadway and highway long hauls by bring back freight trains.
Todd Freese, TX
These dear friends lost their daughters due to a needless crash. Would you please join me as I join them in their quest for safer roads. God Bless You.
Charlie Gray, NC
Driver training and qualification standards must be heightened
Darla Creel, TX
I knew this family. What was sad is that these lives were lost going to a weekend of three graduations and a wedding. We need to support change for lives.
Road Crash, United Kingdom
Best wishes Marianne not far to 6,000
Isaac Karth, NC
Three years ago, I was sitting in my apartment, working on my class projects, when I got a phone call that turned my world upside down. My family’s car had been hit by a truck, and I was the first person that the hospital was able to reach. There was a lot of confusion; no one knew where my two sisters who had been in the back seat of the car had been taken. I had a pair of dice in my pocket that day, the same pair of dice that I had when my father called me later that evening with the news that my sister had died in the crash. Humans are bad at estimating probabilities. A one-in-a-million chance sounds rare, but that’s close to the odds the NWS reports for being struck by lightning, and 330 Americans are injured that way every year. It’s rare, but it happens. In probability theory, it’s called the law of large numbers. If you roll the dice often enough, or for enough people, the dice are going to come up as ones at a predictable, measurable rate. The IIHS reported that in 2013, there were 10.3 deaths from motor vehicle crashes per 100,000 people. That’s about one-in-ten-thousand, way more likely than one-in-a-million. And, unlike other leading causes of death, this is an entirely human-created problem, one that didn’t exist two hundred years ago. Automotive safety has been improving over time. But it is still one of the leading causes of death in America. Curing cancer, one of the other leading causes, is expensive and difficult, requiring research just to figure out if it is even possible. In contrast, for motor vehicle deaths there are many cases where we already know simple ways to reduce motor vehicle fatalities, such as effective underride guards, and we have promising research for even more. We shouldn’t settle for one-in-ten thousand, or even one-in-a-hundred-thousand. We should strive to be better than that. Human lives shouldn’t be a nickel and dime proposition. Even low chances of death are still too high. I shouldn’t have to roll the dice every time I need to leave my house. I shouldn’t have to wonder, every time my family is out on the road, if today is going to be the day that they roll too many ones again.
Catherine Memmer, MI
You could put signs way ahead!!! This is senseless. What if it was your kids that were killed!! Don’t be so cheap!!!!
Donna Profeta, NY Our families’ lives are worth more than the cost in dollars.
In the aftermath of our crash, we have found ourselves walking a path we had not anticipated–safety advocacy. We have discovered the importance of raising awareness and gaining support in order to bring about life-saving changes.
After all, we had no idea about what truck underride guards were before May 4, 2013. How could we expect anyone else to know about them and understand what we were talking about unless we found every way imaginable to inform and motivate them to care about this issue–thankfully, never as much as we do.
So what I would like to talk about here is what you can do about it once you (the reader) better understand the ideas and importance behind our quest for Vision Zero, underride guards, and crash avoidance technology.
Specifically, what you can do is:
Become informed about what we are talking about so incessantly.
Sign our Vision Zero Petition. (Never doubt the power of 1.)
Share our Vision Zero Petition through talking to people about it, emailing, using whatever social media with which you are comfortable. (There are Sharing icons on The Petition Site.)
Read our new website, AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety, which is dedicated to informing about underride guards and raising money for underride research and an Underride Roundtable to bring about the best underride protection by bringing together engineers, industry representatives, government officials, safety advocates, insurance companies, victims & their families, and the media. https://www.fortrucksafety.com/ and https://annaleahmary.com/underride-guards/
Donate to the research. (Every $1 counts.)
Share the website with others.
Share both of these projects with your local media.
When possible, look up your local media and make direct contact with them through a phone call, email, or through an online Contact Form.
This site has a lot of tools for reaching local media, including a map of the U.S. which allows you to click on your state and then your city and find local media. http://sparkaction.org/act/media
Be sure to let them know how important this is to you and your community as well.
Consider making a follow-up phone call.
For whatever you are able to do, thank you! And I’d love to hear about it.
We have made numerous contacts with the media as our story has been shared. But we cannot be in your community. Next week there will be an article in our local Rocky Mount newspaper. I will share the link for that with you and you can pass that along to your local media as well. We are asking you to be an extension of our national plea for the best possible protection.
This is not just some freak problem that will never affect you or someone you love. In fact, a Vision Zero policy in DOT rulemaking could make a big impact in not just truck safety but auto safety as well. Decisions about safety should not be led by profit. Cost/benefit analysis can never adequately measure the value of human life and health.
And, once we establish that our Vision is to reduce crash deaths one life at a time, then we can better hold corporate and government officials accountable. No longer will they be able to sweep unpleasant information about the results of defects and flaws under the rug. No longer can they justify decisions and actions which lead to unnecessary tragedy and/or deny that human life was the cost that was paid.
My family has been through a lot in the aftermath of our truck crash on May 4, 2013. They each have their own story (some more closely-guarded than others). I was surprised but pleased that one of our sons was able to take the time to express his thoughts in the form of a Comment on our Vision Zero Petition a couple of hours ago.
Isaac said that I could share his comments here:
Isaac Karth, NC
about 2 hours ago
“Three years ago, I was sitting in my apartment, working on my class projects, when I got a phone call that turned my world upside down. My family’s car had been hit by a truck, and I was the first person that the hospital was able to reach. There was a lot of confusion; no one knew where my two sisters who had been in the back seat of the car had been taken.
“I had a pair of dice in my pocket that day, the same pair of dice that I had when my father called me later that evening with the news that my sister had died in the crash. Humans are bad at estimating probabilities. A one-in-a-million chance sounds rare, but that’s close to the odds the NWS reports for being struck by lightning, and 330 Americans are injured that way every year. It’s rare, but it happens. In probability theory, it’s called the law of large numbers. If you roll the dice often enough, or for enough people, the dice are going to come up as ones at a predictable, measurable rate.
“The IIHS reported that in 2013, there were 10.3 deaths from motor vehicle crashes per 100,000 people. That’s about one-in-ten-thousand, way more likely than one-in-a-million. And, unlike other leading causes of death, this is an entirely human-created problem, one that didn’t exist two hundred years ago.
“Automotive safety has been improving over time. But it is still one of the leading causes of death in America. Curing cancer, one of the other leading causes, is expensive and difficult, requiring research just to figure out if it is even possible. In contrast, for motor vehicle deaths there are many cases where we already know simple ways to reduce motor vehicle fatalities, such as effective underride guards, and we have promising research for even more.
“We shouldn’t settle for one-in-ten thousand, or even one-in-a-hundred-thousand. We should strive to be better than that. Human lives shouldn’t be a nickel and dime proposition. Even low chances of death are still too high. I shouldn’t have to roll the dice every time I need to leave my house. I shouldn’t have to wonder, every time my family is out on the road, if today is going to be the day that they roll too many ones again.”
A photo of Mary age 5 taken by her big brother, Isaac
Isaac wrote this facebook post on June 19, 2013, in memory of his sister AnnaLeah:
To all the creative people: I recently lost someone close to me. She didn’t know how creative she was and how talented she was becoming, but I did. She didn’t think that she would be able to live up to her siblings. She doubted her talent. She was embarrassed when anyone read her writing. But she kept reading, writing, making.
She was one of the people I relied on to find out about new books. I was counting on her writing the kinds of books I wanted to read. I didn’t realize how much I was expecting from her future until it was gone.
Every death is an irreplaceable loss, but that doesn’t mean we stop living. The absence left behind can’t be filled in this life. That’s all the more reason to build a monument to her memory. I can’t replace her life or her lost works, but I can create my own. They will be different than what could have been, because they’ll be my creations instead of hers. I can’t be her. I can be myself. My works can reflect the life and the hope she believed in, because I have the same hope. I am not justified by my merits (or by hers). I can do my best and no more. That won’t be enough, but it will be right.
To the writers, the readers, the makers, the designers: keep creating. The night will be long and the shadows of your doubts dark. Don’t let that stop you. When you think your work isn’t good enough, it’s a sign to keep going. Your work won’t justify anyone, least of all you, but every creative act that introduces something good to the world is an act of love to those around you.
In memory of those we have lost, and in love to those we have now, I ask you to continue. Keep creating, keep making, keep doing. This is the service you have been given, to love all of creation by creating.
After Isaac signed the Vision Zero Petition and wrote his comment, he shared it on facebook with this message:
“We’ve made it to over 5,000 signatures, which is pretty nice given that we started last Tuesday. Looking at it, it struck me that number is still less than the number of lives lost this year to vehicle crashes.”
FMCSA has been collecting data on truck driver hours of service; now they will analyze the data. Let’s hope that they will find clear answers to the driver fatigue dilemma.
This is a photo which the Georgia State Patrol took when they arrived at the scene of our truck crash. Truck driver fatigue may have been a factor; we never saw his paper log books.
Our family had a paper route for 13 yrs.–afternoons during the week & mornings on the weekend. All 9 kids were involved. We know all about getting out the news–rain or shine, hail or white-out!
Tomorrow, our local paper in NC will be publishing an article about AnnaLeah & Mary for Truck Safety & our Vision Zero Petition. Please share the news with your local media so that people in your community can become aware & help our effort. Stay tuned for details; we will post the link.
Note: The article in the Rocky Mount Telegram will actually be delayed until next week due to the storm. Here are some previous articles on our story by Brie Handgraaf.
In our petition, we have asked for a paradigm shift in how truck underride guards are regulated. This means that, instead of using a force-based design rule, DOT would require performance-based standards. In other words, when a manufacturer designs an underride protection system for a truck, they would have to crash test it and prove that it could actually withstand a crash.
And we want that to be true for higher speeds than currently required and for impact all along the back of the truck–not just at the center but also at the edges (where the guards currently fail in the majority of crashes). And then, we also want side guards to be a requirement.
A Vision Zero rulemaking policy would mean that Saved Lives would win out over dollars in decisionmaking. In contrast, look at what DOT decided about underride guards in 1974:
1974 US Secretary of Transportation says deaths in cars that underride trucks would have to quadruple before underride protection would be considered cost beneficial. (History of federal rulemaking on underride guards:https://annaleahmary.com/underride-guards/ )
In fact, there have been many engineers over the years who have insisted that the guards were weak and ineffective and that stronger guards could be designed. Here are four examples of Vision Zero principles being applied by engineers who are currently hoping to design and/or promote more effective underride protection which would actually save lives:
Dean Sicking, an engineer at the University of Alabama, who designed NASCAR’s SAFER Barrier to save lives and is confident that he could apply those principles to underride protection. Here is the research proposal which he has given to us and for which we are raising money so that he can do it! Development of Trailer Underride Preventive Measures
Aaron Kiefer, a forensic engineer/crash reconstructionist, who has been motivated by the tragic, preventable crash deaths which he witnesses in his work, to design an innovative underride protection system which combines side & rear guard components. We have met him and were able to go see a prototype of his invention on a semi-trailer. http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=NHTSA-2015-0070-0013
When you sign the petition, Care2 doesn’t indicate online what # you were–like they did with our AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up For Truck Safety Petition in 2014. So I don’t know what number I was. But I waited until this morning to sign so that I could think about what I wanted to write in the COMMENTS section as I signed the petition.
This is what I wrote: There is no one that this does not potentially impact in some way. We are asking for bold and decisive action to reduce tragic, preventable crash fatalities. Don’t wait until it touches you personally to move heaven & earth to identify and require the best possible protection. Once a loved one becomes a motor vehicle crash statistic, it will be too late–they will not come back to you.
Can a petition really change rulemaking policy & reduce crash deaths? There is only one way to find out. . .
Please join the 847+ (and steadily rising) people who have signed our petition thus far to let the authorities know that we want to shake things up; we want to see an end to unnecessary tragedies.
On average, 40,000 people die each year in crashes. Currently, the Department of Transportation makes highway safety rules based upon how much safety measures will cost. We are hoping to change that and promote a Vision Zero safety strategy model with goals of Zero Deaths, Zero Injuries, Zero Fear of Traffic.
One of the biggest challenges to making change is the cost/benefit analysis. On the one side there are lives to be saved and on the other side there are companies working to make money. The trick is to try and meet everyone’s needs. The solution has to be effective in saving lives while still being affordable for companies so that they can make the changes necessary without a lot of struggle.
The problem comes in when human life and health get the short end of the stick. The result is that many safety measures are stopped because they would cost more to implement than the “worth” of the “small” number of human lives which would be saved. That’s just not right.
After losing two daughters in a truck underride crash on May 4, 2013, our family made a positive impact one year later by taking over 11,000 signatures on our AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up For Truck Safety Care2 Petition to DOT in Washington, DC. And we have set up a non-profit to promote highway safety research and federal regulations to protect motorists, pedestrians, & cyclists.
Sign our new petition to let DOT Secretary Anthony Foxx know that we want him to:
1. Change rulemaking policy to move away from an economic-rationalist cost/benefit model and adopt a more humanistic, rational Vision Zero safety strategy model. “Vision Zero states that the loss of human life and health is unacceptable and therefore the road transport system should be designed in a way that such events do not occur.” http://tinyurl.com/9uhzyux
2. Apply Vision Zero principles by requiring crash test-based performance standards for truck underride guards rather than force-based design standards along with success at higher speeds—to include rear (both centered and offset) and side guards for both Single Unit Trucks and trailers.
3. Apply Vision Zero principles by requiring NHTSA to initiate rulemaking to require forward collision avoidance and mitigation braking (F-CAM) systems on all new large trucks and buses with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 lbs. or more.
Vision Zero*: Aim high for Zero Crash Deaths & Zero Serious Injuries
* “Vision Zero is a multi-national road traffic safety project which aims to achieve a highway system with no fatalities or serious injuries in road traffic. It started in Sweden and was approved by their parliament in October 1997.[1] A core principle of the vision is that ‘Life and health can never be exchanged for other benefits within the society’ rather than the more conventional comparison between costs and benefits, where a monetary value is placed on life and health, and then that value is used to decide how much money to spend on a road network towards the benefit of decreasing how much risk.”
