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The U.S. Postal Service ordered its trucking contractors to immediately notify the agency of serious accidents, a reversal from past practices that will give officials there a new window into the safety records of those carrying its mail, an email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal shows.
The new instruction to contractors that the Journal reviewed doesn’t address any past safety deficiencies. But it does amount to a major change in how it approaches crashes involving its contracted carriers, calling for details to immediately reach top officials.
The USPS recently told U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly’s office that it didn’t track serious accidents involving its contractors. “No, we are not aware of that number,” the agency replied in response to a question about the number of its contractors’ annual accidents resulting in serious injuries or deaths.
A spokesman for Mr. Connolly, a Virginia Democrat whose office requested an Inspector General’s investigation of USPS’s safety practices last week, declined to comment Tuesday.