August 16, 2006
Questions About Turnpike Accident's Flatbed Truck Driver and Load
The driver whose flatbed truck carrying bricks caused a deadly accident on the New Jersey Turnpike claiming four lives may have been fatigued while driving. WNBC 4 reported last night that driver Dimitrios Tseperkas had been driving for more than 12 hours by the time the crash occured on Monday. Tseperkas drove from Port Jefferson, NY to Maryland to pick up a load of bricks. And what's more, the weight of the bricks and truck combined could have been 500-6500 pounds overweight; witnesses say that the truck was unable to brake upon approaching a traffic standstill on the turnpike, so Tseperkas tried to swerve out of the way, which started to a chain of events that included a car being slammed into another tractor-trailer and Tseperkas' load of bricks falling onto another car.
One of the victims of the crash was 4 year old Theresa Christmas, whose parents and younger sister were crushed by the tractor trailer. The family was on its way back to Queens from a trip to Maryland. Her relatives say that she "knows what happened" since she was "awake during the whole thing."
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Kudos to WNBC for looking underneath the surface on this story to uncover the proximate reason for these tragic and highly preventable deaths - an overweight truck and an exhausted driver.
Why? One may never know, but what about digging even deeper here. What may have caused a truck driver to illegally overload his truck? What may have caused him to skip a nap in favor of illegally driving after 12 hours (11 is the limit for truckers)? Might the trucking industry be under a severe financial crunch because of persistently high gas prices? Might this guy be stretching himself past legal limits because his employer encourages it or even rewards those who do? Might he simply not even be that aware of the regulations that if he followed, might have prevented this?
Do I blame the driver if the truck was over weight and he drove past the 11 hour limit? yes, but the blame does not stop there.
Why is it that stuff even has to be shipped from Maryland to New York by truck? There is plenty of good freight rail and barge options (much safer than individual containers by truck) at least to New Jersey, but Manhattan needs everything to be shipped over the George Washington Bridge. Why is that? Why can't we use some of the tunnel or bridge space for freight rail into the city? Because of the car/truck oriented policies of the Robert Moses era? or maybe because real estate developers want to keep freight warehouses in Brooklyn, Queens and NJ?
How could this accident have been prevented? Many, Many ways. Tragically it was not.
Ugh, Glenn, enough already. Why was the freight shipped on a truck? It was a tragedy, that's true. But for the second day, it really is enough already. I would imagine you have an idea of how many truck miles are spent a year moving goods from one place to another. How many accidents occur? It is still an immensely cheap and safe way to move goods from one place to another. Where should they have shipped it to, the Manhattan Freight Train Terminal? And I imagine your vote is to knock down the developments and replace them with some quality freight distribution terminals. That'll get the tourists licking their chops!
you may 'ugh' at glenn, but he makes valid points. my brother is a career truck driver and he is encouraged off-the-record to stay awake for as long as he can and get his loads delivered ASAP. he is not rewarded for following the rules, but for taking vivran and god knows what else just to stay awake.
I recall a story an old roommate once told me...she would type out dictations for a doctor, and he had one particular patient who was a cross-country truck driver. On his route, he knew the location of EVERY liquor store directly accessible by one of the exits!
Tourists are a fickle breed indeed and we should not be overly dependent on that to keep our economy moving. All it would take is a few more air incidents and people will stop flying in droves across the Atlantic.
We should preserve and maintain some space in Manhattan for critical functions like freight delivery to insulate us from the increasing energy costs that continue to show-up in the prices of goods delivered by trucks. This would prevent accidents, improve air quality, reduce traffic congestion and provide jobs for local residents. One good proposal that would make freight shipments to Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island much easier is the Cross Harbor Freight Tunnel.
I blame the 1933-style Islamic militant regimes popping up all over the world.
Nice job, Glenn. As is often the case, yes, it's one guy's fault, but one guy who was forced to do stupid things at risk of his job, which is probably supporting his own family.
I'm not saying the driver's not responsible, no way he's blameless, but if all this is true and the prosecutions stop there, then he's just a fall guy.
Good comments, Glenn. Would that all of our news outlets had the brains, nerve, and respect for audience intelligence as you show. Not that you're a TV station, of course, but that these good questions rarely get raised when, say, the nightly news covers the Horror of the Day.
Since Dimitrios Tseperkas worked for DTF Logistics (my emphasis on the DT) and DTF Logistics' address = his address (checked on Google), I'm gonna guess that he was his own boss.