If you have ever seen or heard reports about a serious accident involving a semi truck or other large commercial vehicle in Tennessee, you may wonder what can be done to prevent these crashes from happening. Integral to finding ways to prevent crashes is to understand what may cause them in the first place.
A study conducted jointly by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration focused on identifying causes of large truck collisions in which injury or death had occurred. Two types of causes were identified, one being a critical event that made avoiding the accident impossible and the other being a critical reason which was essentially the immediate cause of a crash.
The top three critical events were identified as a trucker rear-ending another vehicle, losing control of a rig or running out of drivable lane. Together these events were attributed to 83 percentof the crashes that were included in the study. When it came to critical reasons, three percent were identified as environmental, ten percent were identified as vehicle problems and a whopping 87 percent related to the trucker drivers themselves. The driver factors ranged from over compensating, fatigue, distraction, excessive speed, poor decisions and more.
If you would like to learn more about the types of factors that may contribute to serious truck accidents and how to seek help after such an incident, please feel free to visit the tractor trailer crash page of our Tennessee personal injury and truck accident website.