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By JOAN LOWY | AP
WASHINGTON (AP) A 19-year-old pickup truck driver involved in a deadly
highway pileup in Missouri last year sent or received 11 texts in the 11
minutes immediately before the accident, federal investigators said Tuesday.
The driver sent six texts and received five texts, with the last text just
before his pickup traveling at 55 mph crashed into the back of a tractor truck,
beginning a chain collision. The pickup was rear-ended by a school bus, which
in turn was rammed by a second school bus.
The pickup driver and a 15-year-old student on one of the school buses were
killed. Thirty-eight other people were injured in the Aug. 5, 2010, accident
near Gray Summit, Mo.
Nearly 50 students, mostly members of a high school band from St. James, Mo.,
were on the buses heading to the Six Flags St. Louis amusement park.
The accident is a "big red flag for all drivers," NTSB chairman Deborah Hersman
said at a meeting to determine the cause of the accident and make safety
recommendations.
It's not possible to know from cell phone records if the driver was typing,
reaching for the phone or reading a text at the time of the crash, but it's
clear he was manually, cognitively and visually distracted, she said.
"Driving was not his only priority," Hersman said. "No call, no text, no update
is worth a human life."
The board is expected to recommend new restrictions on driver use of electronic
devices behind the wheel. While the NTSB doesn't have the power to impose
restrictions, it's recommendations carry significant weight with federal
regulators and congressional and state lawmakers.
Missouri had a law banning drivers under 21 years old from texting while
driving at the time of the crash, but wasn't aggressively enforcing the ban,
board member Robert Sumwalt said.
"Without the enforcement, the laws don't mean a whole lot," he said.
Investigators are seeing texting, cell phone calls and other distracting
behavior by operators in accidents across all modes of transportation with
increasing frequency. It has become routine for investigators to immediately
request the preservation of cell phone and texting records when they launch an
investigation.
In the last few years the board has investigated a commuter rail accident that
killed 25 people in California in which the train engineer was texting; a fatal
marine accident in Philadelphia in which a tugboat pilot was talking on his
cellphone and using a laptop; and a Northwest Airlines flight that flew more
than 100 miles past its destination because both pilots were working on their
laptops.
The board has previously recommended bans on texting and cell phone use by
commercial truck and bus drivers and beginning drivers, but it has stopped
short of calling for a ban on the use of the devices by adults behind the wheel
of passenger cars.
The problem of texting while driving is getting worse despite a rush by states
to ban the practice, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said last week. In
November, Pennsylvania became the 35th state to forbid texting while driving.
About two out of 10 American drivers overall and half of drivers between 21
and 24 say they've thumbed messages or emailed from the driver's seat,
according to a survey of more than 6,000 drivers by the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration.
And what's more, many drivers don't think it's dangerous when they do it only
when others do, the survey found.
At any given moment last year on America's streets and highways, nearly 1 in
every 100 car drivers was texting, emailing, surfing the Web or otherwise using
a handheld electronic device, the safety administration said. And those
activities spiked 50 percent over the previous year.
The agency takes an annual snapshot of drivers' behavior behind the wheel by
staking out intersections to count people using cellphones and other devices,
as well as other distracting behavior.
Driver distraction wasn't the only significant safety problem uncovered by
NTSB's investigation of the Missouri accident. Investigators said they believe
the pickup driver was suffering from fatigue that may have eroded his judgment
at the time of the accident. He had an average of about five and a half hours
of sleep a night in the days leading up to the accident and had had fewer than
five hours of sleep the night before the accident, they said.
The pickup driver had no history of accidents or traffic violations,
investigators said.
Investigators also found significant problems with the brakes of both school
buses involved in the accident. A third school bus sent to a hospital after the
accident to pick up students crashed in the hospital parking lot when that bus'
brakes failed.
However, the brake problems didn't cause or contribute to the severity of the
accident, investigators said.
Another issue involved the difficulty passengers had exiting the first school
bus after the accident. The bus' front and rear bus doors were unusable after
the accident the front door because the front bus was on top of the tractor
truck cab and too high off the ground, and the rear door because the front of
the bus had intruded five feet into the rear of the first bus.
Passengers had to exit through an emergency window, but the raised latch on the
window kept catching on clothing as students tried to escape, investigators
said. Exiting was further slowed because the window design required one person
to hold the window up in order for a second person to crawl through, they said.
It was critical for passengers to exit as quickly as possible because a large
amount of fuel puddled underneath the bus was a serious fire hazard,
investigators said.