Anatomy of an Accident
But safety and liability experts know that catastrophes often don’t have simple causes and that fault may not be clear cut. They do know, however, that trucking companies could be facing serious consequences if their officers don’t understand all the ramifications of liability and all the costs engendered in bad accidents, no matter who is at fault.
The cost of a truck crash is like an iceberg: While some of it is visible, the bulk of it, and the biggest dangers, are hidden below the surface.
The immediate, direct costs can seem like small change compared with what is coming down the pike toward the uninformed trucking company owner. And some insurance industry veterans say the indirect costs of an accident are generally four times the direct costs.
The following scenario is much more common:
It’s a cool evening in early November, about 7 p.m., and a driver is set to haul a load of pottery the following morning from Pennsylvania to an upscale store in the Chicago area. He could leave now, but he wants to get a good night’s sleep first. The driver is fairly new to the profession –– maybe six months on the job –– but he’s a responsible man and doesn’t want to take unnecessary chances.
Having secured the load at a terminal, he drives his rig home, where he needs to back it into his driveway. He stops on the two-lane road facing west and gets ready to back his trailer toward the south. His headlights are on, and he doesn’t see any traffic. He’s done this a hundred times before.
Meanwhile, heading in the opposite direction is a young mother with her two children in the rear seats, coming back from baseball practice. She’s going the speed limit, about 45 mph, and is not tired, not under the influence of any drug. She has been down this road a thousand times before and doesn’t expect anything unusual.
She’s talking with her children when she sees headlights in the other lane. No problem, she thinks. Suddenly, she catches a glimpse of something in her lane, and she slams on the brakes. But it’s too late. The upper half of the car is torn back as the vehicle hurtles into the side of the truck’s trailer. The mother dies but the children in the back seat survive.
What’s happened, of course, is that the woman saw the truck’s headlights in the other lane and thought it was an oncoming car. What she didn’t see was the trailer stretching across her lane of the road.
This kind of crash, Bloch says, is extremely common. It doesn’t involve any obvious recklessness on anybody’s part, but it results in either a serious injury or fatality. And that means liability. In this scenario, it means potentially big liability.
For the full story, see the Sept. 13 print edition of Transport Topics. Subscribe today.
