America's Dangerous Trucks (full documentary) | FRONTLINE

a truck is driving a car goes underneath it and the devastation is horrible in collaboration with propublica correspondent AC Thompson investigates deadly truck accidents I have to wonder if people didn't die because the trailer manufacturers didn't make stronger guards Haas unfortunately is a very real factor and the fight for reform a few hundred dollars per trailer is going to put these companies out of business you kidding me now on Frontline America's dangerous trucks thank you on any given day there are millions of big trucks on America's highways they Tower over everything on the road a single truck can weigh as much as 20 cars to get into an accident with one is often fatal around 5 000 deaths a year and a hundred and fifty thousand injuries and those numbers have been rising for the past year I've been investigating one gruesome kind of truck crash and why they keep happening [Music] [Music] can you tell me about this location where we decided to meet this is a location where we've placed a memorial bench for my son Riley this is a meadow adjacent to the Methodist Church in the village where he grew up a lot of his friends stopped by and just sit on the bench and remember him and can you tell me about your son he was sort of the classic 16 year old that just enjoyed hanging out and having a good time very upbeat I was always laughing he loved to play the piano and the trombone and he could play by ear so he'd come home and go I just heard a song on the radio and he'd sit down the piano and figure out a cool place on what do you remember about that day the day that the world tilted he left around six o'clock as he normally did would drive himself to high school he had to be there by 6 30 for marching band practice about 7 15 I received a call there was an accident in the canyon why would it be Riley so many cars go through the canyon all the time waiting waiting the time was just grinding by at 11 o'clock a sheriff's deputy came up he said for me that um you know when was the last time he saw your son and I said it was you know last night his name's Riley he was driving to high school and he said well I can confirm that he was in an accident this morning and he's passed away and I was like you know 16 year old kid and it it's you know none of it was his fault we hired an Accident Reconstructionist and they went out and gps'd all the skid marks and reconstructed every part of that half mile event that occurred as Riley was in the right lane there was a semi truck and trailer next to him that was fully loaded and is that the driver navigated the turn he faded over into Riley's Lane and forced Riley's Honda off the road as soon as Riley went off the shoulder of the road immediately in front of him was a concrete jersey barrier so he jerked the wheel back to get on the road and his car came back underneath the semi-trailer in front of the rear wheels and became pinned and Riley's car caught on fire and Riley burned to death and the truck driver pulled over when the car was fully engulfed in flames he disconnected the trailer and pulled forward and watched it burn the coroner confirmed a couple of days later they had to identify him through dental records because he was burned so badly after Riley's death his father learned that every year hundreds of people die in accidents like this they're called underwrite crashes they occur when a smaller vehicle a car SUV or pickup slides beneath a large truck like an 18-wheeler [Music] often with devastating consequences [Music] front override underride Rear Front override front override under right side under right side bicyclist underride side under eye side under ride side under ride side under ride front override Rear underride Front override wow so let's go look at the shop Andy young is an attorney in Ohio and a former truck driver then we also rehab old cars too he has represented many families who've lost loved ones in under-ride accidents young is an expert on truck safety he's testified before Congress and advised the Department of Transportation until recently I hadn't heard this term underwrite I don't think most Americans have can you explain to me in simple terms what an underride crash is most crashes involve Bumper to Bumper crashes with other vehicles in a crash where a semi truck runs a stop sign cutting off the right-of-way of a trooper vehicle and the trooper hits the side of the semi you have this mismatch where the bumpers don't match up the bumper of the car literally goes underneath it and the front bumper which is we all know takes the impact doesn't take the impact the crumple zones the airbags and seat belts don't matter to protect the trooper in the first point of impact is literally the windshield and then the head and body of the trooper inside and you see this in your cases that people take it right to the face I see it all the time where the vast majority of them die the same holds true in a rear under eye crash especially when there's an the car steers out of the way so the trooper car would steer out of the way then the first point of impact would be the windshield again so even if it doesn't make a complete contact this kind of corner Edge contact could be fatal it could be devastating devastating you have death by blunt trauma open skull fractures brain damage quadriplegia paraplegia but frequently I would say that you have fatal crashes how long have people been aware of this underride issue arguably goes back to trolley days and this is in 1896 patent for an underride protection safety guard for streetcar A Streetcar trolley 1896. so it's been a hundred years young tells me the First Federal Regulations meant to prevent underwrite crashes were made back in the 1950s the federal government began requiring rear bumpers or guards on large trucks and semi-trailers they were usually made of a few pieces of Steel attached to the bottom of the trailer but there were problems with the regulations the guards repeatedly failed there's no strength testing requirement it just has to be quote something substantial but there's no testing requirement what is that so what I hear you saying is the federal government said they can you can make them out of whatever you want basically yes one accident put underrides in the headlines the 1967 death of Hollywood actress Jane Mansfield six people in it and four dogs a run just dead on into the back of this freight truck the three people in the front will crushed her three children were in the back seat and survived crash attracted attention in Washington but it would be decades before anything would actually change there is then some Congressional discussion about we need to do something more it goes back and forth back and forth where they talk about it but at the end of the day nothing happens I want to find out why nothing happened back then I get a hold of thousands of pages of Department of Transportation documents dating back to the 1960s over and over in the documents I see how Federal Regulators proposed new rules to try to prevent underground crashes and over and over they got pushed back from the main Trucking industry lobbyists 1967 1969 1970 1977 in 1981 the d.o.t's lead Agency on the issue the national highway traffic safety administration or Nitsa made another attempt they proposed that trucks come with stronger rear under eye guards they estimated the cost would be an additional fifty dollars per guard the industry put it at 127 dollars nice to meet you nice to meet you thank you so much Lou Lombardo was a physicist working for Nitsa at the time here's the thing that I've been a little bit confused about when I look at the discussion within Department of Transportation back in this time period 70s and 80s they're talking about what seems like like it's just not that expensive why was this such a big deal it's because the trailer manufacturers and the administration was in a deregulatory mode the underride rule had been announced days before Ronald Reagan took office amid a push to deregulate the trucking industry Lombardo says that once the new Administration came in the agency's Staffing was slashed and everything changed all roommates and came to a halt I mean it literally came to Halt I was in rulemaking and we had nothing nothing to do you weren't allowed to make any regulations no no all regulations stopped Lombardo believes it was a turning point from which the agency has never recovered what was happening is the D agency was being destroyed and we couldn't continue to improve safety did people die unnecessarily oh heck yes it wasn't until 1998 the Nitza finally required trucks to have tougher rear guards more than 30 years after Jayne Mansfield was killed Lombardo eventually retired in 2006. how would you describe your former agency today it is an extremely captive agency it really is captive to who to the Auto industry the Auto industry truck industry they're not public servants they're private servants no one from the Department of Transportation or Nitza would agree to an interview about the efforts to prevent underride crashes and the role of the trucking industry Nitza sent me an email statement saying safety is their top priority and that they had taken steps over the years to reduce underrides but even nitza's major effort the 1998 rear guard rule turned out to be flawed the problem was uncovered at a specialized Testing Lab in Virginia this is the underwrite guard that met the Federal Regulation but in crash tests that we were running at 35 miles an hour they were failing we ran tests with the eight largest manufacturers and only one of the eight could pass all three of these without underride of the Malibu and so we only won only one Matt brombolo is a senior research engineer at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2010 brombolo and his team began testing the Nitsa approved guards that had been on trucks for more than a decade and they were all up to the federal standard yeah all of them met the U.S standard the standard was designed with the idea that it could prevent underwrite at that speed so it was really a disconnect and and how the standard was actually working was that worrisome to you yeah for sure again the thing about an underwrite crash is you have all of this technology that's gone into the your personal vehicle to keep you safe you know airbags seat belts Crush sounds in an underride crash all of that is completely useless really gets triggered and get sometimes the airbags don't even deploy but sometimes they do but it doesn't protect you from hitting your head against the back of the trailer when the car slides under it and you hit your head on this and it's all bad it's always bad yeah so this is one of the cars that you crashed into the old style guards that met the federal standards yes this is just really devastating brumbalo's Discovery prompted most major trailer companies to begin selling new trailers with stronger guards Nitsa also acknowledged that the guards needed to be stronger but they did not change their regulations until 2022. [Music] that delay left millions of dangerous trucks on the road Marianne karth crashed into one of them the rear guard failed and her daughters analia and Mary were killed this is a photo from the crash yes this is at the scene of the crash this was taken by the Georgia State Patrol and this is your car yes that's that's the car this was the car carrier that hit our car and caused us to collide with the trailer I Came Upon slowed traffic I slowed down and a truck driver apparently did not he hit us and caused us to spin around in the back of our car went underneath the truck and you know Lee and Mary were in the back seat and Aaliyah died instantly and Mary a few days later from her injuries I was in that crash but the difference was my part of the car didn't go under the truck and I was injured I was in the hospital but I'm fine I'm physically I'm fine now and my son the front seat hit a minor concussion it was discharged from emergency that night because our part of the car didn't go under the truck and what happened to the the rear guard in your crash it just came off onto the ground it totally came off the truck so if it had been strong enough to withstand that crash and been properly attached it's possible that your daughters would be alive it's possible that my daughters would be alive with the truck that your car struck did the guard on that truck meet Federal standards yes as far as we know the the guard and the truck did meet the federal standard it was a worthless standard as far as I'm concerned since the accident in 2013. Marianne has become a vocal activist on underride safety issues I've gotten a practical education that I never would have gotten otherwise about how rulemaking and legislation you know developing laws and getting laws passed and how much lobbying goes on and how much um tug of war there is so part of the whole problem is the powerful lobby of the trucking industry that has opposed it for decades and the constant shift in who's in control in DC that has all affected whether any legislation gets passed to mandate that the administrative agency Nitsa issues rules or not and so all these complex factors add to the problem although Nitsa wouldn't talk to me in the past agency officials have insisted that their relationship with industry is proper and their decisions are based on data but as acting head of Nitsa during the Obama Administration David Friedman says he experienced intense pressure from the trucking industry when you're at Nitsa what was it like working with industry how did that occur I mean all too often there was just a lot of pushback a lot of Doom and Gloom industry will often come in and say the sky is falling you're going to put us all out of business a few hundred dollars per trailer is going to put these companies out of business you kidding me that's not what the math shows but that's how they influence the politics industry must have a voice but they can't have a disproportionate unfair voice after two years Friedman left Nitza Nitza has been trying for decades to do something about under eye deaths and yet over and over they haven't made the progress that we need why well I think part of it is because industry just keeps pushing back and undermining their efforts if you spend three decades developing but not finalizing a rule on underride protection then you're not actually using the power that you have I do think Nitza staff are there to save lives but are they empowered to save lives are they getting the signals that support their efforts to save lives or they go from one Administration to the next with basically their mission or the intensity of their mission changing it would be hard for any of us if every four to eight years under one Administration they said hey back off industry let them do what they want and then in another they said lean in do everything you can that's really tough one of the most powerful forces when it comes to challenging knits of proposals has been the American Trucking associations the ATA last summer I went to Indianapolis to watch the ata's National Truck Driving championships so coming up on course being the five axle van representing a Dewey mile truckers are judged on their driving skills and ability to spot potential safety problems with their rigs I'd start with one crash or one fatality or Highway injury is one too many Dan Horvath is the organization's vice president of safety policy so if it's something that we can do as a whole as an industry to address that and get to to you know eliminating those those deaths or serious injuries we're certainly going to do this when you look back at the history from 1967 into the 1990s there was a very long time when ATA did not support improving rear guards for underrides and your organization came back to data repeatedly we don't have data or it's going to cost too much at one point ATA wrote to the trailer manufacturers and said you know we don't want you to come out with your own better rear underride guards because it's going to cost too much and you can see highlighted there ATA said the cost is going to be staggering and I have to wonder if people didn't die you know because the trailer manufacturer didn't make stronger guards I I can't attest to what the cost of of rear guard was um you know the time of the letter when it was written but certainly the data piece is going to be important and when we talk about regulations or mandate costs unfortunately is a very real factor in having these discussions about what can and cannot be done in a document from the 1980s the ATA called nitsa's stronger rear guard proposal ill-conceived expensive and ineffectual they estimated it would cost the industry more than two billion dollars over the span of 14 years and it would save fewer than 60 lives each year the cost they were talking about back in that time period was about 127 dollars per trailer it wasn't a lot of money you know for the rear underwriter for the rear under eye guards you know so this is this is the ATA document on it from back that time period I would say to you know the the concept back then and the costs associated with it were you flagged a cost there from my understanding of the discussions that happened back there they're also the data inconsistencies the research concerns of okay if we mandate that certainly cost was a factor then as you highlight it but what other potential you know unintended consequences could exist that we're unaware of now that had led our association to change position over the years of where we're at today supporting that eventually the ATA endorsed and it's a stronger rear guard regulations but they continued to oppose other safety measures over the years in our investigation of under eye crashes we saw the industry coming under Fire we looked at more than 20 lawsuits brought against trailer manufacturers over the past decade Hein h-e-i-n and this case was filed in 2016 and went to trial one of those suits was filed by the family of Riley Hein the 16 year old who died in the crash in New Mexico after the accident they learned about safety devices they believed could have saved their son side guards a series of vertical beams that hold a horizontal one running along the side of the trailer Federal officials had considered mandating side guards back in the 1960s but never did and barely anyone in the industry was using them had they just had a side under red card on the trailer Riley would have bounced off and been fine he would have had some damage to his car but he would have been fine attorney Randy mcginn represented the Heinz in their 2016 suit against utility trailers the company that made the semi-trailer in the crash do you state the testimony that had nothing about you I do in video depositions mcgang questioned the CEO of utility if the government required side under red guards as a law as a rule like they require rear under red guards could you sell a trailer without one we might elect to go out of business rather than build an unset product the company insisted side guards could pose hazards to truckers and other people on the road and they said there hadn't been enough testing or research but in the depositions mcginn reminded Bennett that Federal Regulators had first discussed the idea of side guards decades earlier after the government suggested to the industry 49 years ago that they hoped manufacturers would include side underwrites in their design UTM did not jump right on developing a side under Red Guard that would keep people safe I don't know what we might have done you could have come up with a with a flat under Rod guard that you could have improved over the last 49 years I believe the site underride proposals will be dangerous and cause death and injury long before Riley Heinz death the company had been preparing to defend itself against such a case in Discovery mcginn found a 2004 letter from the truck trailer manufacturers Association a lobbying group this letter of September 3rd of 2004 PMA funded project to develop and evaluate possible defense strategies to cite underride lawsuits you see that sir I'll have to read it okay that's the first persons yes I remember this now okay and the stated purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate possible defense strategies to side underwrite lawsuits isn't that right I don't believe that was the context of it isn't that what it says in the very first sentence yes utility and tan of the biggest semi-trailer companies would end up joining together to fight lawsuits all these trailer manufacturers agreed not to band together to fix the problem but fight lawsuits about site under red guarded her under Red Dirt McGann says the hind family refused to settle their case despite offers from the company during trial they required that it'd be a secret settlement so none of the industry would know how much they settled the case for and the Heinz said no we want to make a public statement with the verdict that they should fix these side Enterprise no one from utility would respond to my request to talk about the case in 2019 a jury found utility negligent in Riley hine's death and ordered it to pay the family almost 19 million dollars the company eventually changed its position and began offering side guards as an upgrade on new trailers around the same time as the verdict Nitsa was facing criticism in Washington a report by the GAO the government accountability office faulted the agency for failing to properly collect data on underwrite crashes and it said Nitsa should conduct more study on side under eye cards I meet with Senator Kirsten gillibrand she tells me she has spent the past several years trying to Rally support for stronger regulations to prevent under right crashes I met with some constituents who had lost their children to one of these horrific accidents and when they described what happened to their family member it just is so devastating and so heartbreaking because all of these accidents could have been prevented and so I got to work with my colleague Marco Rubio who would also met with the constituent from Florida who had lost a child as well and so we thought we should together fix this and so we've been working ever since on legislation that changes how trucks are allowed to be constructed make sure there are guards in the back make sure their guards on the side make sure there's regulations to insist upon certain protocols gillibrand a Democrat introduced the stop underrides act with Republican senator Marco Rubio who declined to be interviewed it called for stronger rear guards and for the first time would have required side cards but the bill repeatedly stalled out in committee when we talk to people in the trucking industry they say those folks on Capitol Hill they don't know our business they don't understand what's going on the roadways and they make this legislation that doesn't reflect reality what do you say to that if they're uninformed and probably they're their bosses and their lawyers and their accountants are saying we're not going to spend this kind of money so it's always about money if you ever ever doubt anytime something common sense that helps people isn't being done it's always going to be about money our Trucking industry is really important to our economies but our job in Congress is oversight and accountability over commerce over business practices especially for safety especially to make sure that the appropriate regulatory framework is put in place so it's our job and so regardless of how powerful or important they are for our economy which is definitely true they have to recognize that this is our job our job as Congress is to protect people back in the 60s the Department of Transportation started looking at the potential to put side guards on trucks to stop side under ride crashes now it's something that you're pushing forward today some 50 years later do you think this has the possibility to actually happen in the near future I do I think it's important that we Elevate the advocacy of the victims who have suffered so much make sure their family's voices are being heard that their stories are being told and so that no member of Congress can say I didn't know the trucking industry put up strong resistance to Jilla Brand's Bill especially the side guards they complain the guards could cost thousands of dollars each and be too heavy we're talking 80 000 pounds in these trailers you're adding more weight underneath it you don't want to be trying to solve a safety Problem by creating another one there's too many people who know virtually nothing about Trucking have an oversized role in shaping Trucking policies Louis Pugh represents an association of 150 000 truckers and Fleet owners he is repeatedly testified against the stop underrides Act and other proposals like it as a former trucker he worries that if side guards were required the cost would fall on small independent truckers like the ones he represents research is key and don't use the truck drivers and the trucking companies as the guinea pigs let's make sure this stuff is working Pew says that side guards could cause cars to bounce off trucks triggering deadly chain reactions he says they won't fit on some trucks and could get stuck when drivers go up and over steep inclines the problem with the side ones speaking as industry speaking to somebody who has Real World experience of driving a truck I believe that there are probably certain instances in certain situations where side under Rock guards will work and save lives I also believe that there are certain instances where side under eye guards will cost lives and we don't know the unintended consequences we need more testing more real world research because what's the unintended consequence what happens when that truck's doing 70 miles per hour and a car hits and it's probably not going to hit perfectly sideways what if it hits at a slight angle will it go on in there or now will it cause the car to bounce into another car maybe kill somebody I want to find out more about the industry's claims that side guards might not work I go to Cary North Carolina to meet someone who's been researching and developing a new type of side guard Aaron Kiefer is a mechanical engineer who has spent almost two decades investigating under ride crashes for attorneys Insurance firms and trucking companies do you know what kind of vehicle that was well for looking at it no but my involvement in the case that's a that's a pickup truck that's a Dodge Ram wow multiple people died might have been even three I don't remember in that case how did you start looking into underwrite accidents I started noticing a pattern where our commercial vehicle is so high off the road that a passenger vehicle can fit right underneath so when did you start Designing Technology that you thought could stop side under eye crashes well back in about 2015 I did some research I started thinking about what would be lightweight and strong and that could be retrofitted onto trucks and trailers and so that's when I started prototyping so what is this this is a cross member that mounts to the bottom of a semi-trailer and it hangs down and creates crash compatibility to prevent underrides what is it made out of yeah so this is a thin wall lightweight high strength steel box tubing design fascinating this is not rocket science right the trailer manufacturers have the engineers on staff who could create things like this overnight if they wanted to and so I hope this this type of design gets picked up and used by by trucking companies you don't care if people steal your idea there's a thousand ways to prevent a car from going under a trailer and none of them are that complicated [Music] FIFA invites us to watch him test his side guards at a state police facility he's not very flexible there you go four foot six and a half what's next well we're gonna hook up the truck to the car and then move it on over into position next and then we should be good to go alrighty we're all good up here okay here we go three two one [Applause] yes he's in good shape system work does designed so this is awesome a step towards highway safety so very happy frontal area of the car absorb the energy and the side of the trailer never got anywhere close to the windshield doesn't look like so we have you know plenty of survival space for the occupant I was looking for the safety structure of the car to be engaged properly which it was so it's a great success to see that that occupant would be fine Kiefer says that despite the promising results he hasn't been able to sell any of his side guards he believes the cost would decrease if the industry was required to install them on every truck there's not been a whole lot of interest from any party in upgrading trailers I have three kids I really hope by the time my kids are driving which will be another decade that trailers won't have this problem he says there is still a lack of recognition of how frequently these crashes occur so there hasn't been any urgency to act by government or industry there's not a lot of knowledge about this type of accident not a lot of money has been spent to really understand it your company deals with 15 to 20 under eye crashes a year that's my estimate from Counting we've done in years past yeah and how many of those would you say were fatal or catastrophic crashes as I recall I want to say two-thirds of the ones that we had had worked through or counted or fatal this was we did two or three years of cases back in the 2017-1819 time frame so your small company in the southeast you're handling probably 15 to 20 of these cases every year which means the problem is much much larger than that if that's what you're capturing with your small company right yeah no I agree despite everything I've learned about side guards when I asked Dan Horvath at the ATA about them he isn't convinced we need the data first the research first to address whether underwrite guards are are feasible and the government accountability office said essentially the exact same thing when they did a report in 2018 2019 time frame was we need more research more investigation into the issue of side on a ride guard crashes to determine if a mandate is appropriate says there aren't even reliable numbers for how many underride crashes are happening I think with the data perspective what I had highlighted as far as the reporting of data if put bad data in you're going to get bad data out of it as a result so certainly I think that we can better our processes at the front end to make sure that we have accurate data to look at and make these informed decisions on the back end during my reporting I hear a lot about the lack of reliable data on under ride crashes it's one of the only things that both the industry and safety Advocates can agree on I find numerous reports and studies about the lack of data misclassified crashes and widespread under Counting the 2019 GAO report also found that underride fatalities are likely underreported and it said nits and needed to improve its counting procedures the official tally of underide crashes comes from a Nitza database of tens of thousands of Motor Vehicle fatalities but the most recent numbers from 2021 show there were more than 400 deaths that year amen is when we look at the data we find discrepancies so that's like what I'm hoping you can help me with is actually figure out what a real number is with my colleague Jeff ernsteausen we examine it's a crash records and check how they're being categorized in the main database I want to show you what I'm seeing this one happens in September 2019. at 1209 on our Friday it's a Toyota Camry and a Freightliner Truck it says the back of the cargo area of the truck was hit in the front of the Camry had the damage I mean it looks like a can opener to the top of the car what I want to know is do they categorize this as an underride crash in the main Federal database the one that they actually make policy from September 2019 Toyota Camry Freightliner truck hold on hold on that's it 2010 that's it 2010 yeah that's the right VIN look look at the pictures can we see how it was coded was it coded as an underride um it was not it was not coded yeah so in the official Federal database no underwrite but when we look here you can tell from the diagram from the photos from the report that this was definitely an under eye crash yeah definitely wow yeah I mean clearly this field is not being collected systematically and correctly in the federal database on fatal crashes [Music] in review of 27 under ride crashes we find that only three of them were actually classified as underrides in the main Nitza database so I served as the acting administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Administration Mira zoshi has first-hand experience with government crash data she ran a D.O.T division that oversees America's Interstate Trucking fleets as a reporter looking at the the federal data around traffic fatalities it's not perfect it's deeply flawed and I think it's hard to even understand fully what the pro where the problems are without having good data and I think part of the disconnect can be the way we track track data about traffic injuries and fatalities is we're reliant on States there's not necessarily uniformity in the way each state records and there's also needs to be more training on what is an underride because oftentimes those fatalities would get mischaracterized as something else not out of any ill intent so I think there's work to be done on making sure that the reporting around this is more uniform Across the Nation and training with individual Highway officers and their their supervision about what an underwrite is and how to make sure to accurately report it and the importance of accurately reporting it because we can only respond to what we know about that's the disconcerting part about not having a solid database because anything outside of that is just a guess and we don't want to be operating on guesswork issues with gloves and solutions about how we paint Trucking safer I meet with the safety advocate in Washington DC who tracks the underride numbers closely we know that in any given year there are several hundreds of fatal truck crashes that are recorded as including underride we also know that there is a severe under counting of the number of underide crashes in this country we know this one from a recent report from the GAO which showed that there was under counting of underide crashes but we also know that you know from other basic facts like that out of 50 states only 17 states have a field on their police accident report to indicate if an underride crash occurred it's just a fraction of what's actually happening is that right yes it's an undercount and a difference of several hundred people could be the difference of what makes a regulation happen or not Adler tells me that knits or regulations follow an economic formula if a new safety regulation costs industry more than 12.5 million dollars for each life saved it probably won't be adopted so when you start to consider if it's under counted by a magnitude of say two or three hundred people per year you could start to see how that makes a big difference in terms of the calculated benefit of a regulation like you know requiring side guards on large trucks or increasing the effectiveness of rear guards on large trucks in other words ignits's cost estimates were lower or their count of the deaths more accurate there would be a stronger case for side guards [Music] for months I try to talk to the Secretary of Transportation the fact that every one of us can think of multiple people we know who lost their lives in car crashes makes us a bit like a society that has been going through a war but after first agreeing to an interview his office cancels I find someone inside dot who will talk to me foreign a safety researcher but only if he can remain anonymous here's the thing that blows my mind and and maybe you can explain it to me the government is using a traffic fatality database that it knows is wrong it knows that it is under counting under ride deaths what is going on there fatality analysis reporting system is held up as a gold standard because it is the only complete count of any type of crash in the United States but as you said there are systemic flaws and decisions are made based on a flawed system it's become clear to me that there are relationships between the regulators and the industry that has regulated that are not beneficial for the public good and I wish to shine light on some of those problematic relationships he points to a DOT study from a few years ago it was about a kind of guard meant to protect pedestrians and bicyclists from being pulled under trucks a study was undertaken by dot to look at how to protect pedestrians bicyclists are there vulnerable Road users in collisions with the sides of trucks a multi-part analysis was done what came out was uh ultimately stripped and the results were changed most of the report was never published one of my colleagues at propublica obtains emails and meeting notes showing ATA lobbyists were allowed to review a draft of the report before publication after the input researchers were told to remove any use of the word regulation it seems like every part is contested by industry the final report didn't reflect the researchers findings that the guards would save enough lives to justify their cost in a statement the dot said it thoroughly reviewed the researchers work and found that data didn't support new regulations the dot said the trucking industry did not influence the report there's a differential relationship between the Department of Transportation in particular the national highway traffic safety administration and the trucking industry when it comes to regulating the safety of their vehicles and their operations the agency is unwilling to confront industry pushback fierce fierce industry pushback last year Nitsa finally updated its standards for rear guards and began taking steps to improve data collection it was directed to do so as part of congress's big infrastructure legislation then in April Nitsa comes out with a new study on side guards they contend mounting the devices on every new semi-trailer would be prohibitively expensive costing upwards of 778 million dollars annually and preventing only 17.2 deaths a year they set up a committee to further study the issue many of the people I've been talking to are on it Marianne karth Harry Adler Aaron Kiefer the ata's Dan Horvath and Matt bromelo after hearing the news I check in with brombolo and he tells me nitset is getting it wrong because they're saying there is no benefit to introducing site under eye guard regulation it doesn't really change the status quo and so unfortunately I'm not terribly surprised that we are where we are now for us to really improve the problem of side underwrite is going to take a different approach brumbelow says his own estimate is that side guards would save as many as 217 lives a year much higher than what nits have found which would flip the cost-benefit equation in favor of requiring trucks to have side guards there are hundreds of lives that are being lost every year inside underride crashes the system that would be needed on a trailer to prevent so many of those fatalities from occurring is not overly complex [Music] one person not on the Nitza committee is the father of Riley Hein whose death helped bring attention to the issue of side guards Eric high now lives in Oregon just the same methodology he's skeptical of the latest news you know Riley was killed in 2015 or seven and a half years into this fight it's it's hard to just sit and watch and wait and hope that Nitza will do the right thing it's really frustrating it's very hard to get this agency to actually adhere to their mission to save lives I mean I'm an optimistic person but I'm cautiously optimistic I still think that the industry has a lot of power and a lot of undue influence with Nitsa and it is incumbent I think upon all of us Advocates and people that are very concerned about how many people are dying from side under ride crashes to keep the pressure on Nitza how does this story end I hope with guards being put on eventually on semi-trailers but I I fear that it's not going to be quick or easy [Music] foreign [Music] programs visit our website at pbs.org Frontline [Music] outlines America's dangerous trucks is available on Amazon Prime video [Music] foreign

Channel: FRONTLINE PBS | Official

Views: 887,218

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Id: 1LyaWzOesXk

Length: 53min 18sec (3198 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2023