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January 2022

Get TAT-Trained, Get a Hat and More!

Go to ICSA’s website at www.safecarriers.org, click on the link in the TAT banner to go to ICSA’s page on the TAT website and take the 30-minute online training and quiz to get certified. When TAT notifies us that you are trained, we will send you your hat and enter you into the $500 drawing.

Human trafficking is everywhere truckers go – on the road, in truck stops and rest areas, in restaurants, even near delivery locations. While more than a million trucking personnel have taken the TAT training, we can’t have too many eyes out there looking for this modern-day slavery.

You could be that one person who saves a victim from a lifetime of being held hostage and trafficked. Take 30 minutes today and get TAT-trained! Click the link below to read about how professional truck driver Arian Taylor helped a young woman escape being trafficked and get back home.

DRIVERS BEWARE: You May Be Criminally Liable in a Crash

By Karen Rasmussen
ICSA Executive Director

If you’ve been in trucking for a few years, you are probably well aware that prosecutors and juries are becoming more punitive and imposing lengthy prison sentences on drivers convicted of negligent homicide in truck crashes. In some cases, judges and juries want to make the guilty driver a public example. In other cases, states’ mandatory sentencing guidelines leave them no choice. The highly publicized case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos is one example.

Aguilera-Mederos, driving a flatbed loaded with lumber supplies, was eastbound on Interstate 70 in the Colorado Rockies on April 25, 2019, when his brakes failed. Investigators said he had not pulled over to check his brakes before starting down the steep, winding road. He also ignored several runaway truck ramps where he could have stopped his truck.

Instead, Aguilera-Mederos kept on driving, coasting in neutral until he plowed into a backup of vehicles already stopped for another traffic incident near the town of Lakewood, Colorado, a Denver suburb. The momentum of the speeding truck started a chain-reaction wreck that caused several vehicles to burst into flames, killing four motorists and injuring six others.

At his October 2021 trial, Aguilera-Mederos was convicted of 27 counts, including six counts of vehicular homicide, six counts of first-degree assault, 10 counts of attempted first-degree assault, six counts of careless driving and one count of reckless driving. Jurors acquitted him of 15 additional counts of attempted first-degree assault. The judge, in sentencing him to 110 years in prison, asserted that he was bound by Colorado’s mandatory sentencing laws to this considerable sentence.

COACHING CORNER

By Mike Hitchcock, ICSA Safety Consultant

Set Your Own SmartDrive Alerts!

At ICSA we are constantly looking for ways to improve safety and make your safety management job easier and more effective. Thus, we are pleased to announce a change in the way you receive alerts from your SmartDrive cameras. Until now when a safety issue happened, it was first offloaded to the SmartDrive response center team for review. SmartDrive evaluated the video and, if applicable, assigned points to the alert before sending it to your board where you could see it. Often, unless you went into the program and looked, you wouldn’t know what alerts you have or what your score was.

Effective immediately, all SmartDrive accounts will have an initial default alert preset to come to your email immediately or on a timing schedule you choose. From the email there is a link to take you directly into the video once you log in. You can edit this default alert if you wish and/or add other alerts. The new default alert will instantly email you when there is a crash, unsafe turning, speeding more than 15 mph over the limit, collisions with another vehicles, pedestrian, parked vehicle, train, run off the road or a roll over etc.

The default alert will be sent to the email you designated in your order (log in), but this too is something you can edit as explained above. We are very excited to roll out this new feature and hope you find it informative and effective in making your safety program the safest on the road. Thanks for all you do to improve highway safety every day!

How Can Filing a DataQ Benefit You?

By Scot Montgomery
Member, ICSA Board of Directors
Wyoming Highway Patrol Captain (ret.)

Read the new blog on our website by retired Wyoming Highway Patrol Captain and ICSA Board Member, Scot Montgomery, on how to make the most of the DataQ process.