Handling The Truth
n June 2002, a driver for a Comcar Industries subsidiary was killed when his vehicle hit the rear of an articulated dump truck. Normally, a rear-end col-lision is evidence enough that the driver failed to control his speed and distance. Not this time. After the accident, Tom Lowe extracted the black box from an Eaton Vorad collision warning sys-tem in the truck. Upon review, the data revealed that the dump truck moved directly onto a two-lane 65 mph highway. The dump truck did not use an available acceleration lane, leaving the Comcar driver only 1.5 seconds to react. The Comcar driver's estate secured a seven-figure verdict due to the information, says Lowe, vice president of risk management for Auburndale, Fla.-based Comcar, which operates five separate trucking companies. If the driver had gone left, the violent move would have jackknifed the truck, perhaps causing further seri-ous injuries or deaths to traffic in the oncoming lanes, he says. Our philosophy is that we are morally obligated to pay for the damage which we cause, Lowe says. But we have every right to fight and defend ourselves when another party is pursuing a claim that far exceeds damage, or is trying to tag us with something we didn't participate in. Accidents often are very complex events. Sometimes the cause is trans-parent the errant turn in traffic or speeding. Usually, however, the cause is not a single event; other vehicles are involved, and decisions and events leading up to the accident may begin hours beforehand even days, considering driver training or inexperience. Whatever the cause, carriers should be proactive in collecting, analyzing and documenting all accident and incident data. Today, onboard record-ers and computers give fleet managers a second-by-second account of events with only a mouse click. Having real-time visibility of events carries its own set of challenges, however. Any safety-related informa-tion drawn from a vehicle, such as rapid deceleration or hard braking, becomes another event to manage and respond to. Plaintiffs' attorneys may jump on any mismanagement of that information as an indica-tion of your failure to control and supervise drivers properly. But don't think the solution is to avoid captur-ing data; that bears its own legal risks that may be greater than the risk of transparency. (See Eyewitnesses in your trucks, page 48.) So with safety event data inescapable, more fleets are looking beyond the black box toward real-time information in order to immediately identify inci-dents that may in fact be accidents, or at least eventually may be the cause of one if left unchecked. Data recording A vehicle's electronic control mod-ules (ECMs) broadcast a wide array 46 Commercial Carrier Journal September 2008 By Aaron Hu .