Personal Injury Law

Trucking Accident Causes Explosion on Highway 40 and Death of Young Man

By Jeffrey Lowe

As a St. Louis semi truck accident attorney, I was disappointed to see that a young man died over this past weekend in a crash with a large truck. According to a Nov. 10 article from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch?s Suburban Journals, 20-year-old Kyle Lauders of O?Fallon died around 3:40 a.m. Saturday, after he crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer. Authorities suspect Lauders was drinking before he drove east in the westbound lanes of Highway 40. His vehicle hit the driver?s side of the truck before scraping down the side of the truck, puncturing the gas tank and causing an explosion. The truck?s driver, 48-year-old Danny Lanier of Kansas City, Kan., was not injured. However, the tractor unit and one of the trailers were demolished in the fire.

From the description provided in the article, it seems likely that this crash was not the fault of the truck?s driver, and I?m glad that he escaped injury. My sympathies go out to Lauders? family and friends. But as a Missouri big rig accident lawyer, I am interested in whether equipment problems may have contributed to the ensuing fire. Large commercial trucks log thousands of miles on the road every year, and accidents are so common that trucking companies build them into their cost of doing business. That means trucks? gas tanks should be well-reinforced in order to avoid an explosion like this one. If the truck?s manufacturer failed to sufficiently reinforce the tank, or its maintainers failed to ensure that those reinforcements were still working, they could be liable for any injuries or deaths that could have resulted.

Human error and bad decisions cause traffic accidents far more often than problems with defective or poorly maintained equipment. But truck defect accidents do happen. One federal study found that malfunctioning or failing brakes were blamed for 25 to 60 percent of all crashes, by crash investigators and safety inspectors. Other studies and real-life accidents have exposed problems with improperly inflated tires, missing or defective lights and other serious safety defects. Despite safety regulations requiring regular maintenance, some trucking companies still cut corners on maintenance in order to save money, gambling that nothing bad will happen. When they lose that bet, their own drivers and all of the drivers and passengers around them are exposed to an unreasonable, unnecessary risk of death and catastrophic injury.

Full post as published by Trucking Accident Attorney Blog on November 11, 2009 (boomark / email).