Recent news reports tying the dangers of sleep deprivation to traffic accidents involving heavy, over-the-road delivery trucks and tractor-trailers have been punctuated by actual stories of fatal and near fatal crashes between passenger vehicles and 18-wheelers. Not only do these relatively large motor carriers pose a threat to passenger cars, light trucks and minivans filled with families, pedestrians, bicycles and motorcycles can also find themselves in the crosshairs of a commercial truck and its potentially impaired driver.
As Maryland personal injury lawyers and trucking accident attorneys, I and my colleagues have seen the result of highway and urban collisions between smaller vehicles and these much more massive trucks. If a truck driver is not fit to drive, a potential accident can be lurking around the very next turn. Sleep deprivation, as well as other modes of driver impairment can increase the odds of a collision, which rarely comes out well for the occupants of a smaller passenger car.
In the case of a Maryland university professor killed in an out-of-state highway crash involving a semi, it would appear that police believed that the driver of the big rig may have been sleep deprived prior to the accident. If so, the unfortunate woman and her two injured children riding with her would be three more statistics added to the ever-growing list of tragic and unnecessary trucking accidents.