truck driver

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When a family member is killed or seriously injured in a crash with a tractor trailer, a normal human instinct is to wait a decent interval before consulting an attorney. Then one may be inclined to take one’s time talking with a hometown lawyer who handles an occasional car wreck case along with divorces, criminal cases and real estate closings.  Meanwhile, trucking companies and their insurance companies are busy burying incriminating evidence.

A recent case in our office illustrates the importance of striking hard and fast to preserve evidence. While a truck crash victim was in ICU at the…

You are a great lawyer in your area of practice. You are also smart enough to know when a big case may require prompt action outside your comfort zone.

Just as a trial lawyer may not feel comfortable handling a complex real estate, divorce or estate planning matter, a great lawyer in those fields may not want to risk a client’s rights by trying to figure out how to handle a catastrophic truck crash case.

When you get a call from a friend or client that a family member has been killed or seriously injured in a crash with a…

Rear underride crash test

Death by decapitation due to trailer underride  can  result when tractor trailers park on the roadside.

The kneejerk response of most people seeing pictures of these incidents is to simply blame the dead person. But it’s not that simple. When an innocent passenger is killed or maimed, some portion of fault is normally apportioned to the driver who departed from the traffic lane for whatever reason. But it is necessary to also examine a trucking company’s decision to violate safety standards by parking a big rig on the side of the road.…

In catastrophic truck crashes that kill or catastrophically injury innocent people, the root cause of the tragedy is often not the momentary carelessness of a truck driver. Rather, the root cause is very often the systemic mismanagement by a company that puts behind the wheel of an 80,000 bomb a person who never should have been driving it. The driver may be a good guy who because inadequate training or experience, bad driving record, or physical incapacity was not well-fitted for the job. That can result in a claim for negligent entrustment.

In 2015, the Supreme Court of Georgia…

A chain reaction crash involving four big rig tractor trailers on I-285 near Camp Creek Parkway in south Fulton County, GA, killed a woman in a passenger car on June 19, 2018.

According to the Georgia State Patrol, A tractor-trailer was traveling northbound when it struck three other big rigs and the rear of a car, pushing the car underneath another tractor-trailer.

News photos showed that at least one truck’s cab was badly crushed and the roof of the passenger car was caved in.

In addition to the one fatality, five others were taken to Grady Memorial Hospital. It…

ABCO Transportation, Inc., a refrigerated freight haulder based in Dade City, Florida, has had for several years an unsatisfactory record of unsafe driving violations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. When a trucking company has a record as bad as ABCO, often there are issues of management turning a blind eye to safety, in my experience as a trucking trial attorney.

ABCO’s poor safety record culminated July 2012 when an ABCO truck driver ran a red light on Thornton Road in Douglas County, Georgia, causing a tragic crash that took the lives of two AutoTrader.com employees and injured…

The Medical Review Board of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has recommended that CDL holders with a body mass index of 30 or higher be referred for sleep apnea testing. There is no timetable for action on this recommendation.

Sleep apnea is a serious disorder that interrupts a person’s breathing during sleep.  It can cause sleeplessness, fatigue, excessive snoring, acid reflux and other health problems, and can aggravate any existing heart or lung trouble. Certain physical features, such as excessive weight, are common to people with sleep apnea, although people who aren’t obese can suffer it as well.

As a lawyer handling interstate trucking accident cases, I see the results of a variety of safety problems. Now, a Houston TV investigative reporter has revealed one more hazard for us to worry about.  Even when the federal drug testing regulations are followed by the testing labs, it is extremely easy for  a truck driver who is motivated to do so to cheat on the test by using mail order drug-free urine. See this video report from Robert Arnold at KPRC TV in Houston, Texas.

Undercover investigators for the Government Accountint Office have found that it is surprisingly easy to cheat on random drug tests designed to catch truck drivers who use drugs.  Using bogus truck driver’s licenses to gain access to 24 drug-testing sites, the investigators  found that 75 percent “failed to restrict access to  items that could be used to adulterate or dilute the [urine] specimen, meaning that running water, soap, or air freshener was available in the bathroom during the test.”
While the FMCSA estimates that fewer than 2 percent of truck drivers test positive each year for controlled substances,  when Oregon conducted its own tests, 9 percent of truck drivers tested positive.
Dozens of products on the Web are marketed to truckers as fail-safe ways to defeat the mandatory drug tests. The GAO team  bought drug-masking products over the Web and was able to mix them with real specimens at the drug-testing sites “without being caught by site collectors,” the agency said in a report scheduled to be made public Thursday.
(Thanks to alert reader David Warren in Florida for calling my attention to this article.)