Women in Trucking - A Woman Driver's Guide

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Many things kill and injure workers every year. Leading the list are traffic collisions followed by falls, violent crime, equipment failure, and even natural disaster! We weren't safe at home anyway, since many people get hurt or die at home, so let's at least make money while we take our risks.

Often workers know full well that they are putting their lives in peril to do their job but it does not deter them. The job may be as mundane as delivering or picking up a product, as noble as snatching someone else from the jaws of death, even keeping our neighborhoods and streets safe, but the truth is we are all are risking our lives to one degree or another to do our job, and we all should get equal credit. Often the reward is the fact that we are alive and well at the end of our shift!

If the above gives you pause or upsets you the good news is that total workplace injuries decreased 6 percent in 2007, according to the Census of Fatal Occupation Injuries. With a total of 5,488 the rate per 100,000 was 3.7 percent, this was the lowest since records were kept. It was down from 4 percent in 2006.

For us drivers the fatal traffic collisions dipped to 2,236 in 2007. Highway fatalities were down 3 percent and this included non-highway fatalities, which were down 15 percent: water vehicles down 28 percent; rail was down 26 percent; and aircraft dropped 23%.

The decreases are great, but highway mileage and usage is higher, so our percentage represents a large number.

Another statistic of impact to our industry is that the number of fatal falls rose to 835, a 36 percent increase since 1992, when they first started counting. And falls are the most common way drivers get injured! So don't get complacent and think that if you aren't driving you are not at risk!

Truck driver is not the job with the highest fatality rate. We moved all the way down to number eight on that list. But we are the job with the biggest number of fatalities. In 2007, we had 1,020 of those and only 673 (66 percent) were actual highway collisions!

Number three on this list: management occupations with 511 fatalities. Their most common manner of death? Highway collisions, which was 14 percent of those deaths.

Law enforcement was number six on the list with 165 deaths, a whopping 39 percent, from traffic incidents. Even number nine, agricultural workers, had highway related incidents as their most common form of death (with 123 lost for 15 percent)

The two most common causes of fatalities on the entire list of ten occupations were traffic collisions and falls, evenly divided at four occupations each. Following those we see that homicide is listed twice, once as the number one cause for sales management, and second and almost equal at 37 to 39 percent for law enforcement as the major cause of death.

I'm sure you noticed as I did how many others are dying on the highways, and probably getting in our way at least part of the time if not creating accidents that some truckers are involved in. But it is kind of ironic, especially when few people have any idea how much danger they are in when they set out on the road, or how much danger they can create because of poor driving skills.

If all employers that send drivers out on the road in any type of vehicle had mandatory driver training, at the very least made defensive driving part of the job training, they would have a huge impact on highway safety. I can imagine it would also have a positive effect on their finances.

Also listed in the census were equipment failures and being hit by falling objects. These too can impact drivers' safety, and it is our responsibility to guard against them.

The lower numbers are encouraging and hopefully will make all of us constantly aware of our role in saving our own and others' lives. And that is the good news! We, by our own actions, can and do have a huge effect on our own and everyone else's safety. A total 98 percent of all road collisions could have been prevented by either driver. We all also must remember that safe driving is a continuing education that never ends. We need to seek ways to keep our awareness up as we get more and more miles behind us. The more experience on the road we gain, the more lax we all tend to get.

If you just put "safe driving" in the search bar of your internet browser, all kinds of web sites come up. Check them out. Take any tests or courses they offer. What better way to spend your down time than doing something that will save your life! If you know the Smith System, use it, if you don't, learn it! It has given me three million accident free miles!

After you complete a task-hooking up, fueling, dropping, delivering, whatever-pause and go through a checklist in your head of each step you should have taken. If you don't actually remember doing it, get out and look! The simpler a thing it is, the more likely it is your brain will click into automatic and skip things unintentionally.
Keep it safe out there! Your questions and comments are always welcome.