TRUCK UNDERRIDE ACCIDENTS: a main hazard on the
highway for passenger cars, federal government finally pushing for change AT A TURTLE'S SPEED
Over 2,000 dead every year, over 60,000 injured every year form truck accidents. It is a war zone out there and little is being done to improve thje safety standards, all in the name of cost. What of course is behind the slow improvement in the safety standards are the lobbbying efforts of the trucking industry.
The main safety issues we are faced today in the
highways and roads/streets are the following:
·
Underride (side, rear, front) accidents;
·
Nighttime crushes on unlit roads;
·
Invalid driver’s licenses;
·
Undercounting of single-unit trucks;
·
Vulnerable road users
The following article addresses the underride issue.
A truck “underride” accident happens when a passenger
vehicle strikes the rear or side of a tractor-trailer and the passenger vehicle
underrides or slides underneath the rear or side of the trailer. The top or roof of the passenger car is often
crushed or removed in an underride accident often resulting in serious injury
or death. In addition, there is often intrusion into the passenger compartment
of the car. Our truck accident reconstruction experts at Metropolitan
Engineering and Forensics have experience in handling tractor-trailer accidents
that involve an underride collision.
FRONT UNDERRIDE
·
The majority of fatal large truck accidents
involve fronts of trucks
·
70% of passenger vehicle collisions with fronts
of single-unit trucks recorded as front underride
SIDE UNDERRIDE
·
Underride accident occurred in about 50% of
passenger vehicle collisions with the sides of single-unit trucks (in accidents
resulting in death or injury).
REAL UNDERRIDE
·
Underrides occur in 70% or more of collisions
between passenger vehicles with the rears of single-unit trucks (in accidents
resulting in death or injury).
Under the 1953 rule, underride guards are required on
38.6 percent of straight trucks and 56.9 percent of tractor combinations; if it
is assumed that all tractor combinations fall under the 1998 standard, the
proportion requiring an underride guard increased to 68.2 percent. Based on a
realistic assumption about the distribution of trailer manufacture year, we
estimate 63 to 66 percent of tractor combinations in fatal crashes should have
underride guards.
At least some underride occurred in over 63 percent of
RES fatal crashes. The proportion was very similar for straight trucks and
tractor/trailer combinations: 63.4 percent for straights and 62.7 percent for
tractor combinations.
Almost a third of automobiles underrode to the
windshield and beyond, compared with about 23 percent of minivans and 15
percent of large pickups.
Underride Truck
Accidents
Underride accidents are potentially devastating traffic
incidents that can cause severe injuries, as a car may drive underneath the
bottom of the trailer and become trapped under the 18-wheeler or semi truck. During these types of truck accidents, the
impact of the collision primarily affects the car’s upper frame and windshield,
not the front of the vehicle. Considering that virtually all safety features
for frontal collisions are focused below the windshield, there are few
protections for the motorists involved in these accidents, putting them at risk
of serious injuries including brain trauma and spinal cord damage.
Safety Features
to Prevent Underride Accidents
There are certain mandatory and optional safety devices
that should be used by truck drivers to reduce the possibility of either a rear
or side underride accident from occurring. These safety features include the
following:
·
Mandatory use of reflective tape across the side
and rear of the trailer
·
Mandatory installation of a rear underride guard
bar
·
Optional use of lights across the side and rear
of the trailer
These features are meant to reduce the likelihood of
side underride accidents by increasing truck visibility, which is especially
important when trucks are crossing lanes of traffic at night. They also help
prevent rear underride accidents by diverting the impact of the collision to
the front of the car rather than the windshield thanks to the placement of an
underride guard bar.
A passenger vehicle offers little to no protection from
a tractor-trailer in a underride collision. There is a substantial height difference
between a tractor-trailer and a standard passenger car. This height difference
can cause the passenger vehicle to ride under the rear or side of the
tractor-trailer. The passenger car is simply not designed to withstand this
type (underride) of collision. Most members of the traveling public are not
aware of this significant danger. The trucking industry, on the other hand, has
been aware of this danger for years.
The United States Department of Transportation (“DOT”)
has promulgated regulations that are intended to prevent underride accidents
from happening. Each trailer or semitrailer manufactured after January 26,
1998, with a gross vehicle weight of 10,000 pounds or more, must have an
underride guard. 49 CFR § 393.86. Trailers
or semitrailers manufactured before January 26, 1998 must also have rear
underride guards, but these guards are subject to less stringent
specifications. Rear underride guards
are commonly referred to as ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) bumpers.
Generally, there are two types of underride guards: rear
guards and side guards. The DOT only requires that trailers have rear underride
guards. This is the case even though serious injuries from side underride
accidents occur far too often in the highways and other roadways across the
United States. Recognizing this danger, many European nations require side
underride guards as well as rear underride guards.
Rear underride or impact guards are meant to reduce the
possibility of an underride from happening or lessen the damage to a passenger
car in a rear impact collision. The DOT defines rear impact guard as follows: a
device installed on or near the rear of a vehicle so that when the vehicle is
struck from the rear, the device limits the distance that the striking
vehicle’s front end slides under the rear of the impacted vehicle. 49 CFR §
571.223. The DOT requires that tractor-trailer underride guards meet certain minimum
standards. For instance, the underride guard cannot be more than 22 inches from
the ground, the guard must extend to within four inches of the side of the
trailer, and the guard must meet certain strength requirements. While these
minimum requirements have improved over the years, most safety groups advocate
for more stringent requirements, particularly with respect to the strength
requirement and height requirement.
Underride accidents or collisions are often not
recognized by members of the public as a potential avenue of recovery because
these accidents involve rear-end collisions, particularly since the claim is
made by an occupant of the vehicle that rear-ended the tractor-trailer. Often an underride case is pursued when the
truck driver acted with due care in operating the tractor-trailer. The issue is whether the rear underride guard
was properly manufactured, designed, installed and maintained and whether the
guard caused the injuries claimed. The
manufacturer or owner of the underride guard might argue that the driver of the
passenger car was guilty of contributory negligence thereby barring his or her
recovery. However, this argument is
generally not available for manufacturer’s to employ against individuals who
were merely passengers in the automobile.
Federal and state laws and regulations are in place to
help ensure that truck drivers are responsible on our nation’s roads and
highways. The rationale behind such laws is clear: Trucks and tractor-trailers
greatly overshadow most other passenger vehicles on the roads. In a truck
accident, size often does matter, which means that crash victims in cars or
smaller motor vehicles may sustain catastrophic or even deadly personal
injuries.
A recent study by the National Highway Safety
Administration seeks to reduce such injuries. One recommendation called for an
update to side and rear underride guard standards. Such guards are intended as
a precaution for cars going underneath trucks in the event of a collision.
Current regulations may be insufficient and outdated, as many of the
approximately 500 fatalities resulting from side collisions involve side
underride.
Another preventative approach might be better technology
for reducing the blind spot zones on tractor-trailers. As with most vehicles,
there are zones on the side and behind a truck or tractor-trailer in which the
driver cannot see other vehicles, even with large side mirrors.
___________________________________________________________
MILWAUKEE (WITI) — A FOX6 investigation has uncovered a
real safety concern on the roads, and even through the government knows about
it, nothing is being done!
Twenty-three years ago, Brenda Jones was nine months
pregnant. Four days before she went into labor, her baby boy’s father was
killed in a car accident. His car ran into the back of a truck.
“I raised him as a single parent for half of his life
and every day kept saying ‘just let me get him. Let me be okay and keep me here
until he`s grown,'” Jones said.
After high school, Jones’ son enrolled at Purdue
University. He played on the varsity bowling team.
This spring, he came home from college for a visit.
On the way to see his grandparents, he was killed in a
motorcycle crash.
“I never thought he’d be gone too. On my birthday,”
Brenda Jones said.
Two months later, Brenda Jones says she had finally
stopped crying. That’s when the phone rang.
“It was someone from my husband`s work, asking if my
husband was here — they`ve been trying to reach him, they couldn`t reach him,”
Brenda Jones remembers.
Jones says she remembers hearing about a crash on the
news. She says she just knew.
“I just — I ran to the scene,” Jones said.
Ben Jones was pinned underneath a semi on I-894.
Cameras caught the accident on tape. The video shows the
semi moving at a snail’s pace. While other drivers managed to swerve around
him, Jones’ husband wasn’t so lucky. His pickup truck slid under the semi. Ben
Jones was trapped and unconscious. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
“We just couldn`t keep him long enough to survive the
crash,” Jones said.
Witnesses said a special safety bar on the back of the
semi had failed, which is how Jones’ pickup truck got lodged underneath.
“I asked and was told that the bar had broken off,”
Brenda Jones said.
The bar is called an underride guard, and most
semi-trailers are required to have them. The underride guards hang down off the
backs of trailers, and they’re supposed to keep cars from sliding underneath a
truck during an accident.
However, time and time again, research shows they don’t
work. Hundreds of drivers die every year — violent, preventable deaths.
“They had tried to help him at the scene. They had
tried, but they couldn`t get to him because he ended up underneath the truck,”
Jones said.
No one routinely keeps track of how many people die this
way. In 2011, the last time anyone counted, 260 people were found to have died
in rear-end underride crashes — two from Wisconsin.
That’s one of the reasons State Patrol Inspector Mark
Barlar takes his job so seriously. It’s his job to make sure the bumper is no
more than 22 inches off the ground, and the red and white candy stripe is
visible. There can be no cracks, and no missing bolts.
However, even Barlar admits the closest inspection might
not be enough to keep drivers safe. There’s no way to test the guard to see if
it really would hold up in a bad crash.
“There is no way for me to test structural integrity of
it. If you could move it by hand that would be a bad thing,” Barlar said.
Even if the bumper meets all the legal requirements, you
could still be in danger.
Matt Brumbelow is a senior research engineer for the
Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. This spring, he and his colleagues
released a study that concluded the current safety standards are not good
enough.
“Roughly 3-5 years ago when we started seeing some of
the crash data that made us wonder if something else could be done,” Brumbelow
said.
According to their findings, federal laws regulating
semi-truck bumpers aren’t cutting it. Their research was based on these crash
tests. Even at speeds as slow as 30 miles per hour, the results were deadly.
That’s why Canadian guards are required to be twice as strong as the ones
traveling on U.S. highways.
“The guard just breaks off the trailer. Canada said
‘these aren’t safe. We’re going to make them safer,'” Brumbelow said.
Since 2011, the IIHS has been petitioning the federal
government to make the same change in the United States — to make drivers on
our roads safer, but so far, nothing has been done — so some manufacturers have
taken safety into their own hands — voluntarily making bumpers stronger.
“You want to put the safest vehicles you can on the
road,” Mark Matthiae, the president of Crystal Finishing in Wausau.
After seeing the videos, his company decided they wanted
their trucks to have the safest guards out there, so they teamed up with
Canadian manufacturer MANAC — which has the strongest bumpers on the market.
“I just don`t understand why the manufacturers wouldn`t
want to make that change. It looks to me like very little cost difference. In
fact, it could almost be a cost savings if it`s designed properly,” Matthiae
said.
It makes sense to Brenda Jones too.
“If it means that maybe somebody can help someone
else…it`s too late for us,” Jones said.
Jones is a single mother…for the second time.
“You hear this little voice standing next to you say ‘I
can`t go to the father-daughter dance anymore or a little boy is having a
meltdown because his dad had promised him fireworks on his first day of
kindergarten, and Dad`s not here,” Jones said.
The day before he died, Brenda Jones’ husband put a
flagpole in the family’s front yard alongside a bench in memory of their son.
It has now become a memorial for both of them.
“He should be here. There’s no reason. They both should
be here,” Jones said.
After three years, the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration has finally agreed to consider tougher standards for underride
guards. Nothing is in place yet, but once the new rules take effect, experts
say it will still be about 10 more years until all trucks on the road meet the
new safety requirements.
Rear underride crashes are easier to address
than front or side ones
In this 2002 fatal underride crash, a Chevrolet Impala
was hit by another vehicle from behind, lost control and struck the back of a
tractor-trailer parked on the shoulder.
A hurried driver looks over his shoulder as he tries to
merge onto the freeway, failing to notice traffic stopped ahead of him. He
plows his van into the back of a tractor-trailer.
A Chevrolet Prizm slams into the side of a
tractor-trailer as it makes a U-turn from the opposite direction at a traffic
signal while both vehicles have the green light.
The driver of a logging truck sees a Ford Explorer
coming toward him in his lane on a rural, undivided highway. Both vehicles move
into the other lane at the last minute and crash head-on.
All of these examples were taken from a federal database
of truck crashes, and each resulted in the death of the passenger vehicle
driver. In the first, the outcome may well have been different if the truck had
been equipped with a stronger rear underride guard such as those already on
some trailers. In the second two crashes, which involved the side of one large
truck and the front of the other, potential solutions exist, but they aren't as
readily available.
Crashes involving the rear of a large truck account for
about one-fifth of fatal underride cases, Institute researchers found in 1997.
Another fifth are side crashes, while the majority are frontal ones. Unlike
front and side underride, rear underride fatalities are often preventable, and
there is a framework in place to address the problem.
"We already have a regulation on rear underride
guards, so we should make sure that regulation is effective," says Matthew
Brumbelow, an IIHS senior research engineer.
Still, with so many underride crashes involving the
fronts and sides of large trucks, should guards surround trucks completely?
In side crashes, underride guards have the potential to
save lives. An IIHS analysis of crashes in which passenger vehicles hit the
side of large trucks found that out of 143 crashes in which the truck side
impact produced the most severe injury, more than half would not have been as
severe if there had been side underride guards on the truck.
For side guards to work, several hurdles would have to
be overcome. For one thing, many trailers have sliding axles that can be
adjusted depending on the load, making it difficult to position a side guard so
that it won't interfere with the wheels. In addition, side guards that are
strong enough to prevent underride would add a lot of extra mass to a trailer —
much more than a rear guard, which doesn't have to cover as big an area — and
in the trucking industry, any additional pounds can affect the bottom line.
The European Union requires side guards, but they are
intended to protect only pedestrians and bicyclists. Because of this, they are
much weaker and lighter than they would need to be to protect people in
passenger vehicles.
Front underride guards, which are required in the EU to
protect vehicle occupants in crashes with combined speeds of about 35 mph, also
might prevent some deaths. An earlier Institute study of fatal truck crashes in
Indiana found that 9 out of 44 front underride crashes might have been
survivable in the absence of underride (see "FARS undercounts fatal large
truck-car underride crashes," Feb. 15, 1997).
However, in most of the crashes studied, front underride
guards would not have changed the outcome. In crashes involving a passenger
vehicle and the front of a large truck, the truck is typically moving toward
the other vehicle. The enormous difference in mass between a tractor-trailer
and a car, SUV or pickup means that there is a high probability such a crash
will be fatal at even moderate speeds, underride or no underride.
___________________________________________________________________
More than 350 people a year are killed when a car
strikes the back of a big truck and slides underneath. There are safety
standards to prevent these so-called truck
underride accidents, but a new study shows the protections aren't working.
Rear impact guards, fastened to the
backs of big rigs, are designed to stop cars and prevent them from
sliding underneath. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) put them to
the test. The Institute crashed a 2010 Chevy Malibu, traveling 35 miles an
hour, into the back of parked trailers. The rear guard that meets the U.S.
standard gave way, and the car slid right under the trailer, crushing the
vehicle. If there had been real occupants instead of crash dummies in the front
seat, the IIHS said they would not have survived.
"Our tests show how easily
some of these guards are failing at relatively moderate speeds," said
institute president Adrian Lund. "The standards need to be stronger. These
crashes don't have to be deaths or serious injuries."
Canada requires rear impact
barriers that are 75 percent stronger than those in the U.S. In the IIHS crash
tests, the Canadian-style guard held up properly when the car hit it.
For Nancy Meuleners, a rear
under-ride crash has meant 40 surgeries and a changed life -- she lost her jaw
and parts of her tongue.
"Speaking can be an issue.
Eating. I can't eat normal foods," Meulener said.
Meuleners, of Bloomington
Minnesota, has lobbied to get stronger rear guards, "We need lower, safer,
more energy-absorbing guards," she said. She is understandably nervous
when driving near a big rig. "They are a danger to me and to the American
public, I feel, without proper underride bars on them."
"It doesn't provide the kind
of underguard protection that clearly is called for," said Bill Graves,
president of the American Trucking Associations, after being shown the test
video.
Big Rig Threat: Cars Slide Under
Trailers
Graves said, though, that there the
right barrier design is a "complicated puzzle to solve."
"That's the question the
federal government has been wrestling now for many years, is what's the
strength we want," he said." What's too much? And what's not enough?"
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a
statement today saying "it is well aware of the scope and severity of the
truck underride issue."
The agency, part of the Department
of Transportation, said it first identified problems in 2009 and has been
studying the issue ever since. It said it hopes to finish its review next year.
"The driving public should
know," said the statement from agency head David Strickland, "that we
are already actively working to address the issues."
One big question: how long will
that take? The last time the government raised rear underride standards, it
took 20 years.