If you are like most people, you don’t get enough sleep. You may survive at work on coffee and struggle to stay awake on your commute home. In fact, some studies show that more than one third of all drivers in the country don’t get the recommended seven hours of sleep to stay healthy and alert.
This statistic may never have concerned you until a drowsy driver collided with you on the highway. Now you are dealing with the pain, suffering and inconvenience that typically follow a traffic accident.
Driving on autopilot
The miracles of modern technology are making cars more automated than ever before. However, fully self-driven cars are still in the development stages, and until they are ready for general use, drivers will have control of vehicles. Controlling a vehicle is difficult to do when you haven’t had enough sleep. In fact, recent studies have made some surprising discoveries, including:
- If you sleep only five or six hours in a 24-hour period, you double the chances of being in an accident.
- If you sleep four hours or less, your chances of an accident increase 11.5 times.
- Even though 97 percent of those surveyed agreed that driving drowsy is unacceptable, almost one third of the same drivers admit they had dozed off behind the wheel at least once.
- One out of every five fatal accidents is the result of drowsy driving.
If you drive while sleepy, you may drift across lanes or have trouble keeping your eyes open. You may realize several miles have passed, but you can’t remember driving them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention urges drivers who feel this way to pull over and rest.
Rest assured that you have an advocate
You may have been fortunate enough to get home safely after a drowsy drive home, but that luck ended recently. If you are dealing with the aftermath of an accident caused by a drowsy driver, you may be wondering if you have alternatives for seeking compensation. Undoubtedly, you are facing medical bills and possibly the expenses of long-term care or rehabilitation. You may also have lost time at work, causing your family to suffer financially. You probably have many questions about your insurance coverage.
To obtain the answers to your questions, you may wish to contact an attorney with years of experience successfully representing people injured by another person’s negligent actions. Having an attorney such as this on your side will more than likely increase the chances that you will achieve positive results when seeking potential compensation in a civil court.