As an attorney who handles truck accident cases across the United States, I have represented truck accident victims and their relatives for a variety of reasons.
In this article, I'll describe some of the causes of truck accidents, starting with systemic causes and moving to more individualized causes.
Equipment Issues.
Whenever you have 80,000 pounds hurtling down a highway at 80 miles per hour on 18 wheels, there's no room for error.
And yet, errors do occur, often to fatal effect.
Here are some recurring causes: Brakes -- Modern trucks are required to have automatic slack adjusters to take up the slack when pads wear down or drums expand.
Mechanics must be trained to maintain these and drivers should never try to manually adjust them.
Many older trucks still have manual slack adjusters, which must be checked, or the brakes can fail, especially when a truck is going downhill and the brake drums expand as friction builds.
Overloading -- A truck may be dangerously overloaded, which affects its handling.
If a tanker truck lacks adequate safeguards, it may be subject to massive forces of momentum when braking suddenly, as thousands of sloshing gallons can cause a driver to lose control.
Instability -- Trucks also may lose stability when braking or turning, and then roll over or otherwise lose control.
In fact, that very issue has been in the news lately.
About three-fourths of large tractor-trailers now on the road lack stability-rollover control systems, which are proven to prevent crashes and save lives.
Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are calling for such systems to become mandatory equipment.
While many large fleet owners support the move, some independent drivers and their organizations call the costs onerous.
And no one is even talking about mandatory retrofitting for trucks already on the road.
Lack of Tracking for Trucking Bad Actors How do equipment failures happen? Usually, they're traceable to poor management and inconsistent maintenance, often exacerbated by inattentive or even bad driving.
Yet amazingly, there is still no national database that tracks patterns of safety violations among trucking company officials, supervisors, and other influencers.
So people who have run trucking companies charged with safety violations can simply shut down a company and start another, bringing with them all the bad practices but none of the safety violations, surveillance, or censure they deserve.
In July 2011, a Federal Motor Carriers Safety Administration committee recommended the FMCSA start just such a database to keep our roads safer.
Human Errors Driving while tired is a common factor in fatal truck and commercial vehicle wrecks.
While the FMCSA's Hours-of-Service rule requires truck drivers to take a sleep break after 11 hours of driving, many truckers prefer to drive at night, when roads are less crowded -- and of course people get tired at night.
That's our biology.
Note that the FMCSA's HOS rule allows commercial drivers to reset their weekly limit by taking a 34-hour break.
But that cuts into earnings, so drivers may try to cut corners.
In June 2011, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance organized Roadcheck 2011, a three-day enforcement and education campaign that mobilized almost 8,000 inspectors to stop more than 70,000 trucks and buses at 2,550 location in the U.
S.
While overall results showed some improvement over previous years, more than half the drivers pulled off the road were faulted for Hours-of-Service violations.
Driving while distracted is another common cause of truck accidents.
Probably the most infamous distracted trucker was the one who killed a young mother near Buffalo, NY, in January 2010, because he was distracted by streaming porn on his laptop -- while driving.
(That trucker was also found to have been very sleep-deprived, which supports my last point.
) But talking and texting on cell phones are also common distractions, despite dozens of state and federal laws restricting or prohibiting both.
Driving under the influence causes accidents in all vehicles.
Truckers are no exception, even though their legal BAC limit is.
04%, half that of a noncommercial driver.
Many use stimulants to help stay awake over long hauls, but all drugs cloud judgment and can lead to unsafe driving.
These are some of the underlying causes of truck accidents, along with some of the trucking regulation and enforcement now under discussion.
If you'd like to talk about your own truck accident case, please feel free to contact me at michael@leizerman.
com or at (419) 243-1011.
In this article, I'll describe some of the causes of truck accidents, starting with systemic causes and moving to more individualized causes.
Equipment Issues.
Whenever you have 80,000 pounds hurtling down a highway at 80 miles per hour on 18 wheels, there's no room for error.
And yet, errors do occur, often to fatal effect.
Here are some recurring causes: Brakes -- Modern trucks are required to have automatic slack adjusters to take up the slack when pads wear down or drums expand.
Mechanics must be trained to maintain these and drivers should never try to manually adjust them.
Many older trucks still have manual slack adjusters, which must be checked, or the brakes can fail, especially when a truck is going downhill and the brake drums expand as friction builds.
Overloading -- A truck may be dangerously overloaded, which affects its handling.
If a tanker truck lacks adequate safeguards, it may be subject to massive forces of momentum when braking suddenly, as thousands of sloshing gallons can cause a driver to lose control.
Instability -- Trucks also may lose stability when braking or turning, and then roll over or otherwise lose control.
In fact, that very issue has been in the news lately.
About three-fourths of large tractor-trailers now on the road lack stability-rollover control systems, which are proven to prevent crashes and save lives.
Both the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are calling for such systems to become mandatory equipment.
While many large fleet owners support the move, some independent drivers and their organizations call the costs onerous.
And no one is even talking about mandatory retrofitting for trucks already on the road.
Lack of Tracking for Trucking Bad Actors How do equipment failures happen? Usually, they're traceable to poor management and inconsistent maintenance, often exacerbated by inattentive or even bad driving.
Yet amazingly, there is still no national database that tracks patterns of safety violations among trucking company officials, supervisors, and other influencers.
So people who have run trucking companies charged with safety violations can simply shut down a company and start another, bringing with them all the bad practices but none of the safety violations, surveillance, or censure they deserve.
In July 2011, a Federal Motor Carriers Safety Administration committee recommended the FMCSA start just such a database to keep our roads safer.
Human Errors Driving while tired is a common factor in fatal truck and commercial vehicle wrecks.
While the FMCSA's Hours-of-Service rule requires truck drivers to take a sleep break after 11 hours of driving, many truckers prefer to drive at night, when roads are less crowded -- and of course people get tired at night.
That's our biology.
Note that the FMCSA's HOS rule allows commercial drivers to reset their weekly limit by taking a 34-hour break.
But that cuts into earnings, so drivers may try to cut corners.
In June 2011, the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance organized Roadcheck 2011, a three-day enforcement and education campaign that mobilized almost 8,000 inspectors to stop more than 70,000 trucks and buses at 2,550 location in the U.
S.
While overall results showed some improvement over previous years, more than half the drivers pulled off the road were faulted for Hours-of-Service violations.
Driving while distracted is another common cause of truck accidents.
Probably the most infamous distracted trucker was the one who killed a young mother near Buffalo, NY, in January 2010, because he was distracted by streaming porn on his laptop -- while driving.
(That trucker was also found to have been very sleep-deprived, which supports my last point.
) But talking and texting on cell phones are also common distractions, despite dozens of state and federal laws restricting or prohibiting both.
Driving under the influence causes accidents in all vehicles.
Truckers are no exception, even though their legal BAC limit is.
04%, half that of a noncommercial driver.
Many use stimulants to help stay awake over long hauls, but all drugs cloud judgment and can lead to unsafe driving.
These are some of the underlying causes of truck accidents, along with some of the trucking regulation and enforcement now under discussion.
If you'd like to talk about your own truck accident case, please feel free to contact me at michael@leizerman.
com or at (419) 243-1011.