Articles Posted in Trucking Accidents

As an Atlanta lawyer focused on trucking litigation, I keep track of how the skyrocketing cost of diesel fuel has implications rippling through the trucking industry and the economy.  The effect on trucking industry economics, the cost of shipping goods, and ultimatley the price of everything we buy, is pretty obvious. Clearly the cost of…

In my law practice in Georgia, I occasionally get calls about tractor trailers that hit someone and do not stop. Identifying and apprehending the hit and run trucker is always a big challenge. State laws in most states  require drivers to change lanes or slow down for emergency vehicles stopped on the side of the…

A tractor trailer making an illegal u-turn on a bridge in pre-dawn darkness caused a Laurens County, Georgia, crash yesterday, as a car became wedged under the trailer, according to a report by Bernie O’Donnell of WMAZ-TV in Macon.  Problems with side conspicuity andtrailer underride are common. When we see motor carrier accidents in the very early morning,…

As a Georgia trial attorney handling trucking accident cases, I see too many instances of truck driver fatigue and drug usage leading to tragedy.  The pattern is exemplified in a Missouri case.  It has resulted in an $18 million settlement for the deaths of four family members (ages 55, 57, 81 and 94) on the…

Skyrocketing fuel prices have put truckers into a world of hurt.  Now two U.S. Senators have introduced a bill that would require 100 percent of fuel surcharges levied on shipping customers to be passed through to the person actually paying for the fuel, in most cases the truck driver.  The bill was introduced by Olympia…

Friday afternoon about 2 pm, I nearly became a statistic in the kind of trucking accident case that I see too often as a lawyer. Leaving Atlanta for the weekend with my wife, we were on I-285 approaching I-85 at “Spaghetti Junction” when traffic in our lane designated for I-85 North ground to a halt.…

On a curvy road near Falmouth, Kentucky, a dump truck hauling rock from a quarry crashed into a school bus, killing a 16-year-old student. The truck driver had been working for the company two weeks, according to a news article by Roger Alford. This incident highlights a couple of categories of safety issues I have…

The handling characteristics of a bobtail tractor (operating without a trailer) are far different from a tractor-trailer combination, especially on wet pavement. Here’s a test I happened to find on Youtube. The results of braking a bobtail tractor on wet pavement are pretty predictable.   Ken Shigley is a trucking and product safety attorney based…

Saturday morning, at the request of a patient’s family  who urgently want to provide for his care needs, I visited an intensive care unit at Grady Memorial Hospital to attempt to interview a man who became a quadriplegic in a recent traffic collision. Laying paralyzed in a bed, breathing through a tube, he was too…

At Bamberg, SC, on 1/7/08, a beer truck, a log truck and two empty Freightliners were involved in a fiery pileup when the log truck lost a tire.  The beer truck burned completely and its driver died. The two empty trucks were driven by brothers  Two men from Rincon, Georgia were driving the empty Freightliners. …