Greyhound doesn’t track driver fatigue in accidents

Benjamin Grove

Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2001 | 11 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Greyhound bus officials do not list driver fatigue as the cause of an accident in company reports, even if investigators rule a driver fell asleep at the wheel.

Instead, Greyhound in accident reports lists accidents as "preventable" or "not preventable."

The fatigue of Greyhound drivers has come under scrutiny recently following two fatal accidents -- one in Tennessee and one outside Las Vegas -- seven weeks apart in which passengers claimed the drivers fell asleep.

Greyhound officials also describe the accident "type," such as a right turn accident; front end accident, intersection accident or off-road accident, spokeswoman Lynn Brown said. But driver fatigue would not be specifically included, so trend statistics about driver fatigue are not available, "not from the way we track these reports, no," Brown said.

Dennis Russell, Greyhound's director of driver operations, said in the 87-year history of the company "this has proven to be the best way (to document accidents)."

Still, the issue is taken seriously, officials said. Driver fatigue is tackled in refresher training courses with all drivers, and drivers are encouraged to call off their shift if they are tired, Brown said.

"Driver fatigue is something we pay a lot of attention to all the time," Brown said.

Greyhound has launched its own investigation, alongside National Transportation Safety Board officials and state troopers, into a Sunday accident in Tennessee in which passengers reportedly said the driver was falling asleep. It followed a July accident 50 miles north of Las Vegas in which Nevada Highway Patrol investigators say the driver dozed at the wheel.

Greyhound officials tout their safety record in which its buses are involved in 0.58 accidents per 1 million miles traveled, about one-third the rate of other commercial roadway vehicles such as trucks, said Wade Gates, a public relations spokesman answering queries for Greyhound.

The buses travel 300 million miles a year with 20,000 departures a day, Gates said.

"It's one of the safest forms of transportation available," Gates said.

Federal law requires drivers to work no more than 10 hours without an eight-hour break. Greyhound limits drivers to 9.5 hours driving with nine hours of rest.

A scheduling committee of drivers and union members meets four times a year to dole out bus routes to drivers. Their diligence in assuring drivers have plenty of rest time became more "robust" after the NTSB recommended scheduling changes last year, Russell said.

But Greyhound, along with many companies in the bus and trucking industries, has been reluctant to embrace a new proposal from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the agency that regulates the industries. That proposal would limit drivers to driving 12 hours in 24-hour period.

Under current law, a driver could drive 10 hours, rest eight, then get back into the bus and have driven 16 hours in a 24-hour period.

"Our stance is that we need to be separated from the trucking industry," Brown said. "We would be happy to delve more into this and do studies about it."

The Nevada and Tennessee accidents followed a deadly Pennsylvania bus accident in 1998 caused in part by a fatigued driver, NTSB investigators said.

Greyhound officials say they moved quickly last year to improve driver scheduling so tired drivers stay off the roads -- a direct recommendation from the NTSB.

In the Pennsylvania accident, a 61-year-old driver crashed into a parked tractor-trailer on the Pennsylvania Turnpike in June 1998. The truck driver, his wife and five others died. The NTSB blamed the accident in part on fatigue caused by an antihistamine and long hours due to bus company scheduling.

Along with improved shift-scheduling, the NTSB recommended that complaints about drivers be considered in driver assessments. It recommended Greyhound revise its 1-800-SAFEBUS program to ensure complaints are taken seriously and used in driver assessments. Two complaints had been lodged about the driver in the Nevada accident.

Greyhound managers pursue complaints with drivers and even send eight to 15 "mystery" supervisors onto buses every day to observe drivers passengers complain about, Russell said.

"When complaints come in, we act on it," he said.

In the Nevada accident, driver Jerry Davis died and 36 of 37 passengers were injured.

In Tennessee, state troopers and the NTSB have not decided if driver Nathaniel Waugh will face charges stemming from the accident.

Meanwhile, Waugh has been charged with driving on a license suspended in New York in 1987 because he didn't pay child support. Waugh was licensed in Missouri and the suspension did not show up in routine background checks, Brown said.

One passenger was killed in the Tennessee accident, and seven passengers remained hospitalized Monday night. The bus overturned after drifting from the right lane to the left lane and hitting a median, investigators said.

The Associated Press

contributed to this report.