Trucking issues are once again flooding my mind.  The work to make our highways safer ebbs and flows in my life.  Sometimes I can push it away and fool myself into believing that my life is what it was before 2004.  Sometimes truck issues seem to be everywhere I look.  This week I am overwhelmed with trucks.

Of course some of these feelings may be because Thanksgiving weekend eight years ago was the last time I saw my Dad.  Spending time with family in his home was poignant and brought my awareness of trucks into sharp focus again.  But there’s been more this week to make me focus on the truck issue once again.

A beloved father, whose wife was killed by a tired trucker in much the same way Dad was, and whose two sons were severely injured, is facing his second set of major holidays without her.  The realization of his new normal has begun to hit.  He’s finally got the boys settled and though the constant care of one of them consumes his days, he has just begun his own painful grief process over the loss of his wife and their life together.  I’ve seen his pain emerge this week, and it hurts to watch.  I wish I could make it all better for him.  But I can’t fix it.

Yesterday  my commute to work was extra long due to a tankard truck flipped over on one side of the freeway, and a couple of miles further, a double bottomed gravel hauler that had gone off the road on the other side of the freeway.   The slow snarled traffic gave me lots of time to think about what may have caused these incidents.  Turns out the tankard truck carried something very bad.  Hazard material crews were on the scene when I went by at 7 a.m. and they were still there when I went home again at 6:300 p.m.  Turns out the driver fell asleep while driving this dangerous load at 5:00 a.m.  No one died, but the cleanup is enormous.

This morning I turned on the news and saw the screen glowing with a fire on another local freeway.  A semi hit a Ford Focus, then bounced over the median, breaking apart and bursting into flames.   They say the driver may have fallen asleep.  Luckily no one died, and the semi driver only broke an ankle.

Falling asleep while driving is a problem of huge proportions.  Not just for the drivers of commercial vehicles, but for all of us.  These recent local incidents are just a few of the crashes that are occurring all across the country every single day.   These two didn’t kill anyone but across the country today an average 11 people will die and another 200 will be injured.  This morning my local news is full of the consequences on rush hour traffic, the spectacular fire video as if that were the only effect on the general public.   I am silently screaming at the reporter to wake up and see that the consequences of these crashes are much greater than a closed freeway.  Screaming that this time we were lucky.

This morning a family that owns a Ford Focus is counting themselves lucky.  But more of us should recognize that we’re all lucky every time we make it to our destination safely.  The odds are that sometime somewhere one of us will find ourselves tangled up with a commercial vehicle.  And that we probably won’t be lucky.  Please stay vigilant.  Stay away from these large vehicles that share our road.  Be careful.

Be safe.