Guardians Of The Highway

Sorry I haven't been able to drop in much lately, but I've been really busy and not had much internet access. But, I just had to drop in and tell you about a really cool thing I saw happen this morning while I was westbound for Colorado from Nebraska.

I was cruising down the road @ 65 mph when another truck passes me in the hammer lane, swerves into my lane, and would have hit me had I not swerved onto the shoulder. He continues down the road and I'm noticing he's all over the place - he can't seem to maintain his lane. I think about calling the highway patrol and then I just blow it off thinking he's probably trying to find his atlas, or spilled hot coffee, or something like that. About ten minutes later I see a patrolman flying by me and I think, oh no, that guys had an accident up ahead. Well eventually I see the patrolman's lights flashing and as I get up closer I see that three other truck drivers have their flashers on and they have boxed this guy in on the right hand lane. One is in front of him, one behind him, and the other beside him. They slowed him down and kept him from getting away until the law showed up.

I don't know what the issue was, but it was really cool to see some professional drivers doing what they could to protect the general public from danger, and other truck drivers from the things that give us such a bad image.

Mixed emotions about that one. On the one hand, it's really cool! On the other, glad the guy didn't shoot someone, or cause an accident. Wonder what his problem was...

I like to see that....If truck drivers don't police ourselves....then the government will. And you know how well that works...

A number of times I've heard of drivers having medical issues while going down the road and they wind up being very disoriented and such - bad reactions to medications, diabetic episodes - things like that. It's definitely a good possibility here.

A number of times I've heard of drivers having medical issues while going down the road and they wind up being very disoriented and such - bad reactions to medications, diabetic episodes - things like that. It's definitely a good possibility here.

Well said Brett; we don't know everything going on it that truck. Its easy to believe the worst but that is not always the case. I actually pulled a driver from the cab who was a diabetic. His blood sugar was all outa whack and as such his driving resembled that of a drunk according to witnesses. Thankfully everything for this driver and others around him turned out for the good as he was able to get the rig safely pulled over and stopped.

Ya know, I was watching a show on TV the one day and they did a study about sleep deprivation. They took two groups of people - one group drank enough alcohol to be over the legal driving limit, and the other group had stayed up for 24 hours straight but were completely sober.

Scary as it sounds, the sleep deprived group did not drive any better than the group that was legally intoxicated.

So indeed, there's no way to know what was wrong with the driver. It's highly, highly unlikely that he was drunk even though he was driving that way. It's far more likely he was severely sleep deprived or had a medical issue.