By Lyric Wallwork Winik
Published: December 12, 2004

"Once sleep periods drop below seven hours, most of us become impaired—often as impaired as someone who is drunk."

It was about noon on Dec. 21, 1999. Melissa Cullen and her dad, Marvin Parks Jr., were driving in Delaware to place a Christmas wreath by her mother's gravesite. Then they were going to share a lunch, just the two of them.

The last thing Melissa remembers is seeing a car veer across the center line—a car with no driver. When she woke up, her father, 74, was dead. Melissa had injuries that required multiple surgeries and confined her to a wheelchair for seven months. She could not return to work as a teacher, could not care for her 3-year-old son and lost her house because of medical bills.

What caused the crash in midday? A 39-year-old woman who had fallen asleep at the wheel. She was a night-shift worker and single mom with four children who had worked all night, then slept less than three hours before the crash. "She got two points on her license and a $115 fine for killing my dad," says Melissa, 42. "I hoped they would at least revoke her license for a while and make her take classes. My dad fought in two wars, spent 42 years working as a chemical engineer for DuPont, cared for my mom through cancer and was a model citizen." But Delaware, like 48 other states, has no specific legal penalties for falling asleep at the wheel.

"Drowsy driving is a silent tragedy," says David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, one of the nation's top sleep experts. The best estimates are that 100,000 auto crashes each year are the result of driver fatigue, with at least 71,000 people injured and 1500 killed. But most experts believe those figures are far too low. In Europe—which does measure incidents of drowsy driving—up to 20% of highway crashes are caused by driver fatigue.

No one is immune. Falling asleep at the wheel killed Herb Brooks, who coached the 1980 U.S. Olympic gold medal ice hockey team. Earlier this year, Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek fell asleep and ran off the road in California, escaping with minor injuries. Surveys by the National Sleep Foundation show that nearly 100 million drivers say they have driven while drowsy in just the last year alone; 32 million drivers admit to falling asleep behind the wheel.

What makes drowsy driving so deadly is that people are poor judges of how impaired they are by exhaustion.

"Our brain is designed to be awake for about 16 hours maximum," explains sleep expert Dinges. Once sleep periods drop below seven hours, most of us become impaired—often as impaired as someone who is drunk. "The biological drive to sleep is so powerful that the brain will literally shut down the body in a 'sleep attack,' even if you are driving in a big city," he adds.

Cumulative sleep loss—routinely sleeping fewer than six hours a night or having interrupted sleep—can have equally deadly consequences.

Even simple tasks are made much more difficult by exhaustion. An alert person can respond to a visual cue, such as a light turning on, in about a quarter of a second. But it takes anywhere from two to 120 times longer for a tired person. Consider this: At 60 mph, drifting just 4 degrees in your lane can cause a crash in 2 seconds. "Many of these crashes are catastrophic," says Dinges, "because a driver who falls asleep even for a few seconds doesn't swerve or hit the brakes."

Preventing drowsy driving is a challenge. Educating drivers, especially younger ones, is tough. Technology may offer some promise in a system that can monitor erratic driving and warn drivers before crashes. A third avenue is the legal system—by making fatigued driving a criminal offense.

New Jersey is the only state with such a law. The crusade was led by Carole McDonnell, whose daughter Maggie, 20, was killed in 1997 by a man who fell asleep at the wheel, crossed three lanes and hit her head-on. He was cited for reckless driving and fined $200. Today, being awake for more than 24 hours and causing a fatal crash in New Jersey can result in up to 10 years in jail and a $100,000 fine under "Maggie's Law."

"People don't have a good fix on the need for sleep," says Richard Gelula, CEO of the National Sleep Foundation. "I would rather see you late than dead."

"I Did This To Myself."
In 1990, Rusty Burris, then 18, fell asleep at the wheel just 90 seconds from home. He'd been awake for more than 36 hours. The crash left him paralyzed. Today Rusty works in the Surgical, Burn and Trauma Unit of the University Hospital in Columbia, Mo., where he sees many drowsy-driving accident victims. "You can become intoxicated with fatigue, like you can with alcohol," Burris says. Then he adds, "I did this to myself. If I did this to someone else, I don't know how I could make it."

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