The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s new Administrator Mark Rosekind spoke on March 13, 2015 at the Consumer Federation of America’s Consumer Assembly.
His Keynote Address was entitled, “NHTSA Priorities and Opportunities: A Two Year Sprint”. Read it here: Mark Rosekind Speech at CFA .
Last year at this time, our family was intensely involved in preparing to launch The AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up For Truck Safety Petition. After our truck crash and tragic loss of the Mary and AnnaLeah, we learned about many things that needed changing to prevent other families from facing similar grief.
When Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx promised that we would see tangible progress in a short time on truck safety issues, and 6 months later we had not, we decided to take our request to DOT on the first anniversary of our crash and invited other people to join us by signing our petition.
Last March, after brainstorming with our family, two of our sons were designing a website for the petition, but as time was getting short to launch the petition and we wanted to make sure that everything would go without a hitch, we changed course and applied all that hard work to an existing site, Care2 The Petition Site. And on March 19, we launched the petition.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/957/501/869/stand-up-for-truck-safety/
And we shared our story: https://youtu.be/I-WQBEDpTVw
We were amazed as the numbers started rising and quickly surpassed our hopes. By the time May rolled around, we had over 11,000 signatures on our petition. We printed each signature as an individual petition and stuffed it in an envelope and delivered these envelopes in person on May 5, 2014, in Washington, DC.
Here is a graph showing the number of signatures by state:
Eight members of our family, including our grandson and granddaughter traveled to Washington, DC and sat down with administrative officials from NHTSA and FMCSA. We were well received, presented our concerns, heard from them on their efforts, and had a productive discussion. And here are the “notes” which our 4 year-old granddaughter, Vanessa, took at that meeting:
We are proud of our family and thankful for the many people who stood with us to voice these vital concerns.
What came out of our petition and the meeting we had with DOT that day? Did it make a difference? Here are the three requests which we made in the petition and what has come about:
The AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up For Truck Safety Petition is still open. People are still finding it and signing it (without our doing a thing to promote it). People care about this issue and we want you to know that we are being heard and that we are continuing to advocate for safer roads.
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/957/501/869/stand-up-for-truck-safety/
At some point, we hope to send out a final update to all of the petition signers (now at 11,530 plus the 150 people who sent a paper petition to us)–letting them know about the progress made and encouraging them to stay in contact.
When we were getting ready to go to DC last year, one of our sons asked what we would do after the petition was over–would we still do truck safety advocacy? I said I didn’t know. . . but here I still am–continuing to keep track of what is going on, writing, writing, writing, and speaking up for all of us who are vulnerable on the roads, calling for action in matters of life & death.
I sent an email out yesterday to the University of Michigan Injury Center–asking them to consider helping to design an underride guard which would provide the best possible protection.
This morning I decided to put out a wider call for assistance — both in expertise and financial backing — for this worthy lifesaving endeavor. Surely we could put our heads together and make this happen! I’d like to see this done to enhance the efforts of NHTSA to develop an improved rule on underride guards.
Let’s stop talking and take some action! Spread the word.
Marianne
HERE IS MY EMAIL WITH DETAILS OF OUR STORY & THE NEED FOR AN IMPROVED UNDERRIDE GUARD DESIGN:
“I would like to ask that you consider taking on the goal of developing an underride guard design which will prevent vehicles from riding under trucks in rear-impact collisions to a greater extent than the current federal standards provide protection–thereby preventing horrific injuries and unnecessary deaths.
I am a 1979 Health Behavior/Health Education graduate of the University of Michigan School of Public Health and received your recent email with information about the Research Centers, including the Injury Control Research Center. In addition, I am the mother of nine children and was driving the three youngest from North Carolina to Texas on May 4, 2013, to attend four college graduations and the wedding of their older siblings, when a truck hit us twice spinning us around and sending us backward under the tractor trailer in front of us.
AnnaLeah (17) and Mary (13) were in the back seat. AnnaLeah died instantly from mechanical asphyxia and Mary died a few days later from injuries (including severe head trauma, carotid artery dissection, and LeFort fractures of her face) she sustained in the crash. I was in the hospital for almost a week but am totally healed physically, and my 15 year-old son in the front passenger seat had a mild concussion and was released that same day from the Emergency Room. The girls, in the back seat, experienced underride; we did not.
In the days, weeks, and months following that crash, our family discovered many things about truck safety.One of the things which we learned about were underride guards, steel bars on the back of a trailer mandated by federal regulations following the national attention gained by the death of actress Jayne Mansfield due to an underride crash in 1967.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-16/dead-girls-mom-says-100-truck-fix-may-have-saved-them.html
Unfortunately, the specifications have been shown to be inadequate in many circumstances; many of the underride guards on the road today too often fail to prevent underride–whether it be due to the design, installation, or maintenance of the guards. This has been seen both by review of the Large Truck Crash Causation Study and through research done by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS)–among others.
https://annaleahmary.com/2014/10/iihs-reports-on-new-crash-testing-for-improved-underride-guards/
Following our crash, we initiated an online petition requesting DOT to make improvement in three truck safety areas, including underride guards. After delivering the 11,000+ petitions to DOT in Washington, DC, we met with top administrative officials from FMCSA and NHTSA on May 5, 2014–one year after the crash. We were able to meet for an hour–sharing our concerns and hearing what their plans were relative to our three requests.
After hearing that NHTSA was not able to let us know if they were going to initiate a new rulemaking process on underride guards, my husband Jerry asked several times when we might expect that they would decide whether to go ahead with such a process. Finally, David Friedman, deputy director of NHTSA, replied that we could expect a decision in two months. I then asked him to email me as soon as the decision was made. And he did so–emailing me on July 9, 2014 — almost exactly two months later — to let me know that they had issued a rulemaking to study this issue.
Unfortunately, this is a very lengthy process which is frequently subject to setbacks due to opposition from the trucking industry. In addition, there is controversy about whether the guards could be made “too rigid” and result in unintended consequences due to deceleration forces.
Yet, the IIHS has told us in person that, “It is safer to run into a brick wall than into the back of a truck.” This is due to the fact that if you run into a brick wall with a vehicle equipped with a crush zone, that crush zone is able to go into effect and protect the occupants. However, if a vehicle hits the back of a truck and the underride guard fails, the vehicle goes under the truck so that the passenger compartment is intruded upon and the crush zone (air bags and seat belts) is not allowed to operate as designed.
We have also written letters to trailer manufacturing companies asking them to voluntarily improve their guards–as did Manac, Inc. IIHS has continued to communicate with manufacturers to let them know that they would be glad to test any new designs. They have gotten some response.
The bottom line is that NHTSA is hoping to issue a new rule mid-2015 and whatever they propose, if passed, will likely have an impact on road safety for years to come. It is my hope that there would be cooperative efforts taking place to come up with the best possible protection for travelers so that others will not have to go through what our family has had to and lives will not unnecessarily be abruptly brought to an end.
https://annaleahmary.com/2014/12/underride-guards-lets-move-forward-in-2015/
Please consider how you might be involved in this along with the School of Engineering and whatever other resources could be harnessed. Surely, by working together, we can make a difference.
In memory of AnnaLeah and Mary,
Marianne Karth”
See Underride Research Reports listed by NHTSA : http://www.nhtsa.gov/Research/Crashworthiness/Truck%20Underride
A Helpful Guide to Understanding the Rear Underride Guard Rulemaking: http://www.underridenetwork.org/CurrentIssues/UnderrideGuards/RearGuard.aspx
I heard back tonight from David Friedman, deputy director of the NHTSA. (See previous post for my email to him earlier today. https://annaleahmary.com/2014/12/trucking-fatalities-increase-for-fourth-year-in-a-row-hours-of-service-rules-rolled-back/ )
This is what he said, “Thank you for reaching out.
“We are heartened to see overall progress, but as Secretary Foxx said today on a call with reporters, ‘32,719 lives were lost on our roads in 2013. And even one is far too many.’
“And as I noted, ‘As we work each day at NHTSA, these are tragic reminders of the importance of our efforts and how we must build on our many successes and continue to work even harder to protect the American public.’
“And yes, fatalities involving large trucks is one of the areas of disappointment because we saw an increase. We are working hard on multiple steps to turn that around, from electronic stability control, speed limiters, vehicle-to-vehicle technology and more. And, as you know, another area we are trying to make progress is on underride guards.”
On the matter of underride guards, he said, “The schedule is for an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on rear impact protection for straight trucks to tentatively move forward around the beginning of the year and a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on rear impact protection for trailers to tentatively move forward around the middle of the year.”
Here is the recent Bloomberg News article on our story & underride guards: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-12-16/dead-girls-mom-says-100-truck-fix-may-have-saved-them.html
I hope that 2015 will bring vast improvement in preventing ghastly deaths from underride.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has just released a report on recent crash testing for one trailer manufacturer’s improved design for their rear underride guard. Vanguard has now passed the 50% overlap test–with testing still needed for the more narrow overlap test at the edges of the trailer’s guard.
Additional companies have plans to get their guards tested in the future.
Our story is featured in this fall’s edition of the organization’s Status Report. We are thankful for their efforts to research and report on this vital truck safety issue. Their previous reports helped us to better understand the weakness of the current federal regulations for underride guards.
Read the report here: IIHS Status Report October 2014
Also, the Truck Safety Coalition has issued a press release on this issue: http://trucksafety.org/press-release-industry-makes-improvements-while-rule-for-better-underride-languishes/
Link to IIHS Status Report Issues: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr
November 2015 IIHS Status Report with an update on Single Unit Truck Underride Rulemaking: http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/50/9/2
Jim Strickland, consumer investigator with WSB-TV in Atlanta, looked into underride guard problems in November 2013 in the Atlanta area and reported on them: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/youll-never-look-tractor-trailers-same-way-again/nb4Kf/
Here is his newscast in April 2014 after the National Transportation Safety Board issued their recommendations to NHTSA to improve underride guards:http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/ntsb-recommending-safety-device-big-rigs-after-cha/nfZYM/
When he found out that NHTSA had initiated a rulemaking process for underride guards, he wanted to do an update. He called me yesterday at 11 a.m. for a phone interview.
His report on underride guards, our crash, and the AnnaLeah & Mary Stand Up For Truck Safety Petition was on WSB-TV Atlanta’s evening news yesterday in two parts first at 4:45 p.m. and the second part at 6:15 p.m.: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/families-seek-reduce-fatal-tractor-trailer-acciden/ngtnD and http://bcove.me/vfrhezzh
Safety Research & Strategies, Inc., makes note of the NHTSA initiation of rulemaking on underride guards.
While they provided a good summary of the history of underride guard regulation, I would like to note that they apparently overlooked NHTSA’s mention of an underride guard petition from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) in the Footnotes of the Federal Register announcement.
After the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) initiated a rulemaking process which would improve safety requirements for rear underride guards, Rebecca Kern, reporter for the Bloomberg BNA’s Product Safety & Liability Reporter, interviewed me to find out what I could tell her about this significant stepping stone.
Bloomberg BNA granted me permission to share the article here: bloomberg bna article .
After reading the article, please also read my comments about the quote in it from the American Trucking Associations (ATA) and my communication last week with Ted Scott, the ATA Director of Engineering Services: https://annaleahmary.com/2014/07/clarifying-the-ata-position-on-underride-guards-2/ .
Reproduced with permission from Product Safety & Liability Reporter, 42 PSLR 808 (July 21, 2014). Copyright 2014 by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc. (800-372-1033) <http://www.bna.com>
Photo collage: From life’s first cry to final breath: AnnaLeah & Mary.
