Safety Ratings and Accidents
Posted on May 1, 2007
Filed Under GETTING AUDITED
When DOT conducts its audits, it will generally assign a safety rating to that motor carrier. There are three ratings: Satisfactory, Conditional, and Unsatisfactory.
It is very important that you be assigned the highest rating of Satisfactory, for reasons I will detail in some later post. In determining the ratings, DOT considers not only if you are in compliance with the regulations, but whether or not you are having too many crashes. It will take the number of serious or “recordable” crashes you have had, multiply that times 1,000,000, and divide that by the number of miles you have operated over the past year. That ratio cannot be more than 1.5. Or, put another way, you cannot have more than 1.5 recordable crashes per million miles operated.
What is a recordable crash? An accident where there is a death, an injury treated away from the scene, or a vehicle towed from the scene is a recordable crash. An incident where a driver bent the ICC bumper backing into a dock is not a recordable crash.
If your ratio is too high, it can cause you to have a Conditional rating all by itself, even though you may be complying with all of the rules. This is just another benefit to having safe drivers who do not cause accidents.
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Eric Arnold is a Former Enforcement Agent with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, and a leading expert on USDOT compliance for small businesses. Do you have a question for Eric Arnold? Email him at eric@arnoldsafety.com.
Arnold Safety simplifies D.O.T. Compliance for commercial vehicle operators. Get Eric Arnold’s USDOT Compliance Guide, DVD, & Regulations at ArnoldSafety.Com.
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2 Responses to “Safety Ratings and Accidents”
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Eric,
Just a note for your readers. Even if your truck is stopped for an accident, and another vehicle hits you in the rearend, and that vehicle has to be towed due to damage sustained from the ICC bumper. You will still have an recorable accident against you. Even though your driver was doing everything correct, you get slapped in the face with it. Trust me, this scenario happened to our company. It will not do any good to try and fight it either, trucking company’s have no legs to stand on, when it comes to fighting the DOT.
Thank you, your articles are very informative.
Mike: Glad you like the articles. I’m trying to give people a reason to check out the blog periodically, provide something of value, and who knows, at some point they might even buy something here and there. As for the accidents, if you have an accident which is not your fault, it counts against your Safestat score, which is what DOT uses to determine when they are going to audit you. There’s nothing you can do about it, DOT doesn’t care that it wasn’t your fault, it hurts your score.
If there is an audit, you can get the DOT auditors to not count non-preventable accidents against your safety rating. But the accident has to be clearly non-preventable (like the one you described). For example, if you run into something, regardless of the circumstances, DOT will generally call that ‘preventable’.