Sammy Pruitt stopped at 6:30 every morning for bacon and biscuits at C & E market on a rural highway south of Nashville. Last summer he was pumping gas into his pick-up when a tractor-trailer came sliding toward the gas station on its side. Pruitt died instantly. The truck driver, Robert Peyton, told emergency workers he had fallen asleep behind the wheel. Peyton had been driving all night to deliver a load of air conditioners.
The trucker was never prosecuted or ticketed and still has a valid Kentucky commercial driver's license – which shows no sign of the fatal accident. He could be hired to haul hazardous material tomorrow. How big a problem are sleepy truckers in Tennessee? WSMV's I-Team analyzed truck accident reports statewide over the last five years and found 64 crashes where a trucker who was listed as "apparently asleep" injured or killed someone.
In 70 percent of those cases, the trucker never got a ticket. We found another 22 cases where "driver fatigue" was listed as a factor in a crash where someone died or was injured. We used half a dozen databases to find out how often Tennessee truckers fall asleep at the wheel and kill or injure someone, and what happens when they do. Tennessee, like all states, uses a standardized form to report accidents.
It then forwards these reports – called Uniform Traffic Crash Report in Tennessee – to the federal government. If you remember taking those standardized tests when you were in school – the ones where you use the number-two pencil to fill in the bubble – that's what these crash reports look like. I had reviewed accident reports in the past and knew there was a collection of fields that describe "driver factors." Police officers can check up to three boxes that describe the "driver factor conditions." One of the driver conditions is "apparently asleep," another is "fatigue." (If you do a similar story, request a blank crash report so you will know all the fields.) I asked the Tennessee Department of Safety to extract reports that involved crashes that involved a large truck and injuries or fatalities.
We looked at five years' worth of data. If your state law does not require officials to write programs to extract specific data, you might have to work with a larger set of data. The Tennessee Department of Safety produced the data within a couple of weeks of my request. It came on CD, already in a database format. It contained two tables: the main table, called "crash parent" and a second, named "driver vehicle." The latter table contained details about the truck driver.
Each table held 8,700 records and 25 or so fields. I used Microsoft Access database manager to join them and run queries. The analysis was straightforward: we isolated cases where the driver condition field met the criteria we were interested in – "apparently asleep." We had to be careful because "apparently asleep" could appear in any of the three fields that describe the driver condition. We were able to very quickly calculate how many sleepy drivers were involved in fatal or injury accidents.