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New Distracted Driving Data Shows Emergency Responders At High Risk

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April is Distracted Driving Awareness Month, and the National Security Council (NSC) released new data this week that explores added transportation risks when emergency responders are en route to provide aid. It is clear that the mere presence of emergency personnel on the road can cause distractions for drivers and bystanders. To date, 16 emergency responders have been struck and killed by vehicles this year in the United States.

According to a survey released jointly by the NSC and the Emergency Responder Safety Institute (ERSI), 16 percent of respondents said they either have struck or nearly struck a first responder or emergency vehicle stopped on or near the road. Yet still, 89 percent of drivers say they believe distracted motorists are a major source of risk to first responders.

Key findings included:

  • 71% of drivers take photos and text while driving by emergency responders on the side of the road (this drops to 24% under normal driving conditions)
  • 60% take time to post to social media and 66% email about the situation
  • 80% admit to “rubbernecking” – that irritating, but also risky, practice of slowing down all traffic to get a better look
  • 49% say that possibly being struck by a vehicle is “just part of the risk” of being a first responder

As part of its #justdrive campaign, NSC has developed a free Safe Driving Kit to help employers keep their workers safe and is hosting a webinar on April 23, titled “You’re Not As Safe As You Think You Are,” to educate employers on the real risks of distracted driving and what safety-forward companies are doing to combat them.

“The cruel irony is, we are putting the people who are trying to improve safety in very unsafe situations,” said Nick Smith, interim president and CEO of the NSC. “Our emergency responders deserve the highest levels of protection as they grapple with situations that are not only tactically difficult but also emotionally taxing. Save your communications for off the road; disconnect and just drive.”

Already on the NTSB’s List

Earlier this year, Risk Management Monitor reported on the National Transportation Safety Board’s (NTSB) Most Wanted List of transportation safety improvements for 2019-2020, and “Eliminating Distractions” for all vehicle drivers is at its top.

In 2016, more than 3,100 fatal crashes on U.S. highways were attributed to driving-while-distracted. These crashes involved 3,210 distracted drivers, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), because some of them involved more than one distracted driver. Furthermore, the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute concluded that commercial drivers are at extremely high risk of a crash when texting—23 times greater than when otherwise engaged.

The NTSB states:

Contributing to the problem is the widespread belief by many drivers that they can multitask and still operate a vehicle safely. But multitasking is a myth; humans can only focus cognitive attention on one task at a time. That’s why executing any task other than driving is dangerous and risks a crash.

Personal electronic devices (PEDs), such as cell phones, are one of the greatest contributors to driver distraction and the NTSB recommends banding all PED use on U.S. roadways. The District of Columbia and 37 states restrict the use of cell phones by novice drivers, and 47 states, DC, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the US Virgin Islands ban text messaging for all drivers.

 

New Fatigue Reports Awaken Employers to Injury Risks

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The National Safety Council (NSC) estimates that roughly 13 percent of workplace injuries are attributable to sleep problems, causing an economic impact of $400 billion. NSC information suggests that employers with 1,000 employees could incur losses of more than $1 million per year in missed workdays, lower productivity and increased healthcare due to employee fatigue.

But rather than merely provide a bunch of statistics and projections that could put you to sleep, the NSC is providing possible solutions to combat the risk in its new report Managing Fatigue: Developing an Effective Fatigue Risk Management System. 

According to the report, a workplace culture that rewards or tolerates fatigue can indirectly lead to on-the-job injuries. In some high-performance cultures, employees may view fatigue as a sign of weakness or laziness. They may be committed to getting the work done despite long hours, even believing that fatigue doesn’t affect them.

“In our 24/7 world, too many employees are running on empty,” said Emily Whitcomb, NSC senior program manager for fatigue initiatives.

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“Employees are an organization’s greatest asset, and addressing fatigue in workplaces will help eliminate preventable deaths and injuries.”

Strong fatigue risk management systems blend employee education and training with improvements to workplace environments, culture change, and data-driven programs. But implementing a fatigue risk management system is not an easy sell — to the C-suite and possibly also to employees. The report suggests:

It is important that the fatigue management process be transparent and that appropriate information is shared throughout the effort to obtain buy-in from all levels of the organization. Providing open forums that allow employees to share how fatigue affects them is one way to get engagement from the outset.

The NSC lists key components in creating a fatigue risk management system:

  1. Education and training. This raises awareness of risks, create motivation to prioritize rest, and provide information on how to manage fatigue and get proper rest.
  2. Policies and practices. Clarify roles and expectations and institute policies and practices for hours of work and rest based on science that recognizes the physiological need for sleep and circadian rhythms.
  3. Shared responsibility. Employers and employees should cooperate when it comes to understanding the sleep needs of the employee, while the organization should expect output from a well-rested worker.   
  4. Fatigue mitigation. A workplace with positive environmental controls promotes better overall working conditions and should be less physically stressful in ways that contribute to on-the-job fatigue.
  5. Data-driven programs and continuous improvement. With the system in place, seek employee feedback, facilitate monitoring mechanisms, check the data and apply lessons learned. Understand why the system was or was not successful and modify from there.  

Complementary to Managing Fatigue, the Campbell Institute – the center for environmental health and safety (EHS) excellence at the NSC – released results from a pilot study conducted among renowned safety organizations to assess worker fatigue and effective countermeasures. In Understanding Fatigue Risk: Assessment and Countermeasures, the Institute identifies a persistent gap between how employers and employees view fatigue and argue for changing a culture to enhance safety.

According to the study, about one-third of workers surveyed reported sleeping between one to five hours per weekday, and not the expert-recommended seven to nine hours.

“This indicates that a large proportion of workers at these sites are chronically sleep deprived, which when coupled with longer work days and work weeks than scheduled means that the risk of a fatigue-related injury is significantly increased,” the report said.

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Additional information about workplace fatigue is available at nsc.org/fatigue.

Fatigue in National News

The timing of these reports should be welcome news for employers. Earlier this month, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) unveiled its 2019-2020 Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements. One of the 10 items included the need to “Reduce Fatigue-Related Accidents.”

The NTSB’s Open Safety Recommendations describes fatigue as “a pervasive problem in transportation that degrades a person’s ability to stay awake, alert, and attentive to the demands of safely controlling a vehicle, vessel, aircraft, or train.” There are currently 27 open recommendations for railroad, aviation, highway and marine operators in an effort to curb fatigue-related accidents.

“We do not simply come up with these recommendations based on a whim,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said during the list’s unveiling in Washington, D.C. “It’s a data-driven approach based on the results of our investigation and the tragic and senseless deaths we investigate.

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NTSB’s Most Wanted Improvements Reflect Major Transportation Disasters of 2018

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The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) unveiled its 2019-2020 Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements today. The 10-item list is associated with 267 open NTSB safety recommendations that mark critical changes needed in the next two years to reduce transportation accidents, injuries and fatalities, and longstanding safety issues that threaten businesses, professionals and the traveling public.

The list, which is now available online, was unveiled at the NTSB’s press conference in Washington, D.

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C.:

  • Eliminate Distractions.
  • End Alcohol and Other Drug Alcohol Impairment.
  • Ensure the Safe Shipment of Hazardous Materials
  • Fully Implement Positive Train Control (PTC)
  • Implement a comprehensive strategy to reduce speeding-related crashes
  • Improve the Safety of Part 135 Aircraft Flight Operations
  • Increase Implementation of Collision Avoidance Systems in All New Highway Vehicles
  • Reduce Fatigue-Related Accidents
  • Strengthen Occupant Protection
  • Require Medical Fitness – Screen for and Treat Obstructive Sleep Apnea

“We do not simply come up with these recommendations based on a whim,” NTSB chairman Robert Sumwalt said during his opening remarks. “It’s a data-driven approach based on the results of our investigation and the tragic and senseless deaths we investigate. The NTSB’s most wanted list is written in blood.”

Sumwalt said driving while distracted – from cars to trains – had risen to be one of the most prevalent transportation risks facing American roads, railways, businesses and the general population. Texting-while-driving, he said, can increase the likelihood of a crash between four and 20 times. Sumwalt said the NTSB has called for an outright ban on all mobile devices when operating a vehicle because of the distraction to a driver’s cognitive ability and has urged policymakers to regulate the use of devices like Bluetooth and hands-free phones the same as standard mobile device use.

He also said that nearly 37,000 fatalities were reported on roadways in 2017, the most recent year of data available.

The inclusion of distracted driving dovetails with a study released in January by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), which highlighted the marked increase in drivers using phones in risky ways. based on an observational survey of drivers in four Northern Virginia communities drivers were 57 percent more likely to be observed manipulating their phones, like when texting or using for purposes other than phone calls.

Based on findings that fatal crash risk is 66 percent higher when manipulating a phone, IIHS researchers estimated that about 800 crash deaths in the United States in 2017 could be attributed to drivers texting or using phones for things other than talking.

PTC also received special focus during the NTSB panel discussion and press conference. Board member Jennifer Homendy said the most recent data is from the third quarter of 2018 and that, “we are closer to installation but there’s a big difference between installation and operational. We’re a ways away from that, unfortunately. The risk is the same 50 years ago as it was a year ago,” she said, referencing the PTC-preventable crash she investigated exactly one year ago in Cayce, South Carolina.

After Congress passed the PTC Enforcement and Implementation Act of 2015 it also authorized the FAST Act, which allocated $199 million in PTC grant funding and specifically prioritized PTC installation projects for Railroad Rehabilitation and Improvement Financing funding. The Association of American Railroads estimates that freight railroads will spend $10.6 billion implementing PTC, with additional hundreds of millions each year to maintain. The American Public Transportation Association has estimated that the commuter and passenger railroads will need to spend nearly $3.6 billion on PTC.

As previously reported, several major transportation providers, such as AMTRAK and the Long Island Railroad have missed critical deadlines for installing PTC.

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“In 1961 President Kennedy set a goal to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and in July 1969 Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did that,” Homendy said. “In 1969, NTSB investigated its first PTC-preventable accident. In one decade we put a man on the moon but in five decades we haven’t implemented PTC.”

NTSB Searching for Clues in Hoboken NJ Transit Crash

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Information about the Sept. 29 crash of a New Jersey Transit commuter train into the platform at the Hoboken, New Jersey, terminal is still scarce, as the train’s rear data recorder was recovered but not functioning, and the engineer has said he has no recollection of the accident. The crash killed one person and injured more than hoboken-station100 others during the busy morning commute.

The crash of NJ Transit’s Pascack Valley Line train #1614 was the first fatal accident of a New Jersey Transit train since 1996, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB).

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Experts at NTSB worked with the recovered data recorder’s manufactures to access data, however, “unfortunately, the event recorder was not functioning during this trip,” Bella Dinh-Zarr, NTSB vice chair, said at a press conference on Oct. 2.

She also said that investigators indicated the allowed speed on the curved area of track leading into the station is 30 miles per hour and it could have supported speeds up to 45 miles per hour. There were also no signal irregularities in the system leading into the terminal.

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The NTSB team is currently photographing the train cars before demolition of the surrounding area. Dinh-Zarr said they were also able to use a drone to capture 109 aerial images of the accident scene, paying special attention to the collapsed roof of the terminal. “This is the first time we have used the NTSB drone to document a rail accident,” she said, adding that investigators used a laser scanner to create 3-D images of the cab car and a portion of the second rail car.

The train’s engineer told investigators that his cell phone was turned off at the time and stored in his personal backpack, which is still located in the cab of the control car, and he had also conducted required brake tests prior to departure.

Witnesses have described the high speed of the train as it traveled into the terminal, renewing discussion of positive train control (PTC), which experts say might have prevented this and a number of other train crashes in recent years.
ptcontrol

“PTC has been a priority for the NTSB,” Dinh-Zarr said. “We know that it can prevent a lot of different types of accidents—train-to-train accidents, derailments due to overspeed, work zone incursions. But we need to remember that PTC cannot prevent every accident, and we just don’t have enough information yet.”

As reported in Risk Management Magazine last year, PTC is a technology designed to eliminate human error by using four components: GPS satellite data, onboard locomotive equipment, the dispatching office and wayside interface units. The system communicates with the train’s onboard computer, allowing it to warn the engineer and display the train’s safe braking distance based on its speed, length, width and weight, as well as the grade and curvature of the track. If the engineer does not respond to the warning, the onboard computer will activate the brakes and safely stop the train.

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Congress enacted the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which required each Class 1 rail carrier and each provider of regularly-scheduled inter-city or commuter rail passenger service to implement a PTC system by Dec. 31, 2015. That date had been pushed back to the end of 2018, however, to avoid possible shutdown of some railroads.