Hello, this is Darrell Castle. I’m an attorney licensed to practice law in the state of Tennessee and on this video today, I’m talking about accidents involving large trucks – trucks that you might call semis or tractor trailers – that type of truck.
If you’ve been a victim of an accident with one of those large trucks, or you know someone who has, then you’re probably wondering, what happened? What caused the accident? Every year, thousands of people are injured – catastrophically sometimes – even killed by these accidents and it’s really hard to determine what actually happened without an investigation.
The Federal Highway Safety Administration tell us how to investigate these accidents. They tell us that there are federal regulations that control the activity of these trucks on the highways. They tell these trucks how fast they can drive. They tell them how much weight they can carry, what types of loads they can carry. They tell them how long the driver can drive without going to sleep.
Quite often trucking companies and drivers violate these regulations and you really have to have an investigation to find out if that happened in your case. But, it’s due to the negligence of the truck driver, the trucking company – sometimes it’s a product failure on a part of the truck, like the brakes. Sometimes it’s failure to properly maintain the truck, like maintaining the brakes and other moving parts of the truck that may cause it to veer off the road or change lanes inadvertently or something like that.
Sometimes the truck driver gets drowsy or falls asleep and crashes into the vehicle in front of him. And when you’re pulling 40,000 pounds behind you, that crash can be catastrophic.
A truck accident lawyer Memphis, TN trusts knows that when a trucking accident occurs between a truck and a car, it’s often catastrophic because the truck is so much bigger and heavier and is traveling at such a high-rate of speed that it’s often quite dangerous.
So, you really need an investigation to determine if these things happened in your case – if the trucking company was at fault, it’s very important to determine that because large trucking companies usually have large insurance policies and they’re much more capable than most auto drivers of really paying for the damage that they caused. That’s why their insurance policies are there.
But those accidents have to be investigated, so if you have an accident involving one of these trucks and you’re wondering what happened, you really need to find somebody that’s capable of investigating it and determining that for you.