Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/947211
14 | Overdrive | March 2018 Logbook The Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association has filed a peti- tion with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration asking the agency to allow drivers to pause their 14-hour daily clock for up to three straight hours and to nix the 30-min- ute rest break required by current hours of service regulations. "The current regulations are overly complex, provide no flexibility and in no way reflect the physical capabili- ties or limitations of individual driv- ers," the association writes in its peti- tion. "They force drivers to be on the road when they are tired or fatigued, during busy travel times and adverse weather and road conditions." The HOS rule requires drivers to take a 30-minute break within their first eight hours on duty each day and does not allow their 14-hour clock to stop. Under OOIDA's pro- posal, drivers would not be required to take the 30-minute break and would be allowed to take a rest break of up to three consecutive hours and "effectively stop the 14-hour clock." Drivers still would be required to take 10 consecutive off-duty hours before starting their next shift under OOIDA's petition. "Current HOS regulations force truckers to comply with a regulatory framework that jeopardizes their safety and the safety of the traveling public," states the petition signed by acting OOIDA president Todd Spen- cer. "The federal HOS should foster safe driving habits, not prevent them." FMCSA is working to study the feasibility of reintroducing flexibil- ity to HOS regulations by allowing drivers to split their duty time into split-sleeper segments. OOIDA's request for an HOS overhaul comes just shy of a year after the industry scored a win in overturning portions of the 2013-in- stituted HOS reforms that required drivers' 34-hour restarts to include two 1-5 a.m. periods and limited the restart's use to once per week. – James Jaillet OOIDA requests pause button for hours Bogus medical certificates could be issued if license numbers were stolen during a hack of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's online registry of U.S. Department of Transportation-certified medical examiners, say some DOT-certified medical examiners. The registry site remained down at press time. FMCSA said in January "there was no evidence of exposure of the personal information of drivers, medical examiners or motor carrier operators." The agency has since declined to update any findings about the nature of the hack and what data might have been at risk of exposure. Cindy Bagwell, manager of the Primary Care Clinics of Georgia in Gainesville, fears that access to licens- ing information, should it have been exposed, could allow for creation of fraudulent medical certificates. "Absolutely it could be done," agreed Dr. Tiffany Ringfield, an- other Atlanta-area based examiner. "There's nothing to stop them from getting a copy [of a medical certifi- cate] and just inserting my number on it." Agency spokesperson Sharon Wor- thy has declined to answer questions about how drivers can find medical examiners while the site is down and whether the outage has caused disruptions in the issuance of medical certificates. Drivers are free to find certified examiners, but without the convenience of the registry. Drivers are required to maintain paper copies of their medical cards and provide their commercial driver's license-issuing state with their medi- cal certificate after receiving it. Dr. Mike Megehee, president of the nationwide Team CME net- work of clinics, said there's little to no private medical information on the forms that medical examiners must transmit to FMCSA. The only private health information poten- tially at risk for exposure is whether the drivers need an exemption from FMCSA for vision, hearing, seizures or diabetes, he said. – James Jaillet Examiners see potential fraud after FMCSA hack The now three-month-long outage of FMCSA's online registry has caused examiners to hold a backlog of thousands of exams.