Dirk Derrick (00:00):
Welcome to The Legal Truth, the podcast created to provide you general legal information about South Carolina law, lawyers, and the legal process, and hopefully prevent you from being surprised by the unexpected. We will answer many of the questions I've been asked during the past 35 years about South Carolina personal injury claims, and workers' compensation claims. We will also discuss existing laws and proposed changes in the law and how they affect you.
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My name is Dirk Derrick. I'm the founder of the Derrick Law Firm, and I'm your host.
Voiceover (00:35):
Please see required ethics disclaimers in show notes.
Pearl Carey (00:42):
Hello, everyone, and welcome back to The Legal Truth Podcast. I'm your host, Pearl Carey, and I'm here with Dirk Derrick, and today we'll be discussing the truth about what causes tractor-trailer wrecks.
(00:54):
So Dirk, my first question for you is how big a problem are truck crashes in the US and in South Carolina?
Dirk Derrick (01:01):
It's big. I'd first say that we need truck drivers, and there are truck drivers who are doing it the right way. And given stats or talking about what causes truck accidents is not negative towards the majority of the truck drivers, but the statistics are bad.
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I'll give you some numbers. Nationally, in 2022, there was about 503,000 police reported crashes involving large trucks in the United States, and 5,300 of those were fatal crashes. And roughly 114,000 people were injured during those crashes. The same year, 5,936 people were killed in crashes involving large trucks, and about 70% of those killed were people in the other vehicles, not the trucks.
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Here in South Carolina, recent FMCSA-based data showed that South Carolina had about 3,167 large truck crashes in 2024 and roughly 3,000 truck crashes a year and about 1,800 injuries each year from 2021 to 2022. NHTSA and state level summaries indicate that around 140 to 150 people a year are being killed in truck-related crashes in our state. And South Carolina ranks among the top states in the country for fatal crashes involving commercial trucks. So it's a problem.
Pearl Carey (02:23):
So what role do federal regulations play in civil liability after a crash?
Dirk Derrick (02:28):
Yeah, most interstate trucking companies are controlled by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, and those are important because they set the minimum standards for interstate trucking companies. And they also are very important because they can identify who's actually responsible for the wreck. It's easy to blame the truck driver, but they have regulations regarding maintenance, training, hours work, speed, all those things that can point out whether or not this was a driver-only incident or was it a company violation that led the driver to behave the way they behaved, causing the wreck.
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Those regulations can support negligent hiring, negligent training, negligent supervision, things that put a driver in a situation to cause an incident. So any trucking case is different than just a typical car accident because we don't look just at the incident, but we dig down deep to see what the actual cause of the wreck is.
Pearl Carey (03:34):
Absolutely. So how often is driver fatigue or hours of service abuse behind truck crashes?
Dirk Derrick (03:40):
Fatigue is one of the classic causes of wrecks. These truck drivers are pushed to run as many miles as they can to get product delivered. I'll give you a stat. There's a large truck crash causation study looked in depth at serious truck crashes and found that driver-related issues were the critical reason in about 87% of those crashes with fatigue as a key associated factor. So it's a huge contributor to these wrecks.
(04:12):
The federal regulations set how many days a week a driver can drive, rest periods, recoupment periods are how long you need to be out of the truck before you can get back in it and drive it again. So those regulations control when a driver should be allowed to drive. and companies who violate those regulations put their drivers in bad situations. You can see it when the companies are pushing their drivers by giving them miles to drive that they just cannot drive at the regular speed limit and get there, or the drivers aren't keeping their logs correctly. They have to write down their driving time. So falsifying logs in order to meet the requirements of being somewhere on a certain time is a problem. And then you look at the company who may not be auditing or monitoring the logs and may know that the driver's falsifying it, but they don't audit and they don't hold them responsible.
Pearl Carey (05:07):
So along that same vein, how does speeding and driving too fast for road conditions play into those federal regulations?
Dirk Derrick (05:13):
Speed is huge. I mean, they drive in 80,000 pound vehicles and they can't stop like a car can stop. So the faster they're going, more time it takes them to stop and react to dangers on the road. A lot of the data shows that speed is a contributing factor to a lot of trucking accidents. The companies get in trouble for scheduling trips that they can't make and drive the speed limit. They get in trouble for having drivers who are repeated violations of speeding and they leave them in their trucks or they hire new drivers who've got bad driving records and they leave them in the trucks.
(05:49):
And also a lot of trucking companies will have GPS systems or data in their trucks to monitor how fast their drivers are driving, but they ignore the fact that it's showing them that the driver may be violating the safety rules and violating the speed limits across the states that they're driving.
Pearl Carey (06:06):
So a lot of times these companies are kind of able to feign ignorance is what you're saying?
Dirk Derrick (06:10):
Well, they have responsibilities on top of the driver. The driver has the ultimate responsibility not to be speeding in the truck, but they can be pushed to where for their livelihood they feel like they need to. The companies have responsibilities too, to schedule things far enough apart, that they don't have to speed. If somebody has repeated violations, to take them off the road, and not hire new drivers who have shown in the past who they are as far as driving fast.
Pearl Carey (06:36):
So kind of taking this back to the individual level, what about distracted driving and cell phone use by these truckers?
Dirk Derrick (06:42):
The federal regulations prevent handheld phones. They prevent texting. So you can't text, can't use a handheld phone. The liability of the driver usually comes from texting or driving the phone in the hand. Company liabilities can come if they don't train their drivers not to use it. Or if they're actually talking to their client, their drivers electronically by texting them while they're driving or knowing that they're using handheld, they don't do anything about it. They can have responsibility too.
Pearl Carey (07:13):
And so how do drug and alcohol violations show up in a trucking case?
Dirk Derrick (07:18):
I would tell you that drug and alcohol actually shows up less in trucking cases than regular car cases.
Pearl Carey (07:25):
Oh.
Dirk Derrick (07:25):
I mean, these are professional drivers. They want to keep their job. So on a percentage standpoint, it shows up less than in personal cars. But now when it happens, it can be awful because they're driving these huge trucks. The federal regulations require companies to do pre-hiring testing, random testing, post-accident testing. They're under a duty to really make sure these drivers are doing drug and alcohol. They can get into trouble with the companies can get in trouble when they violate any of those, when they don't do pre-employment, they don't do post-accident or random testing. If they know somebody's have a violation, then they ignore it. They affirm on paper that things are being done when it's not being done. So to summarize that, it doesn't happen as much as in cars, but it can be terrible. And the companies can be held liable if they ignore things that the regulations require them to do.
Pearl Carey (08:23):
So how often do maintenance and brake problems cause these truck crashes?
Dirk Derrick (08:27):
Maintenance is a big deal, especially bad brakes and worn-out tires. There was a study, FMCSA causation study found brake problems were the single most frequently coated vehicle factor in large truck crashes, about 29% of crashes in the sample involved brake issues with tire problems also high on the list. The federal regulations require people, the companies that do inspections, repairs, and to make sure that the equipment's good when it's on the road.
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The biggest violations of that is when truckers and companies are responsible for pre-trip inspections. If they don't take that serious, if they just kind of go through it or ignore it, it can be a problem. If there's out of service repair requirements and they skip and put the vehicle back on the road, if they're running on thin tires, all of that can lead to liability on behalf of the company.
(09:23):
In a trucking case, all of that stuff will be subpoenaed. I mean, all of it will be looked at as far as... Especially, I mean, if there's a wreck and the truck driver said, "My brakes didn't work right, or I couldn't stop fast enough, or if there's a tire blowout," all of that's going to be investigated to see every time new tires put on, the maintenance, the repair reports, everything, to see if they followed the regulations and the requirements to make sure that the truck is safe on the road.
Pearl Carey (09:50):
So we've all also seen photos of trucks that have tipped over or lost their load. So what about overloaded trucks and cargo securement violations? How does that play a role?
Dirk Derrick (10:00):
Yeah. Federal regulations, again, they have rules on everything to do with these trucks. And they tell what kind of load they can carry, how it's got to be loaded, how it needs to be strapped down, how it needs to be inspected. And if a truck is overloaded, got too much weight, it causes major problems. It can cause a truck to turn over. It slows down the reaction time, the ability to stop. If there's any kind of movement and it's not properly secure, you got a problem that can cause major wrecks. So that's a major problem. Problems you see from the trucking companies is, did they properly load it? Did they properly secure it so it can't move? That weight starts shifting around and you're in trouble. And then the driver's actually inspecting it before they get on the road to make sure everything's in sound as far as weight and security.
Pearl Carey (10:47):
So a lot of people assume that these truck crashes are just evident of bad drivers, but what can companies do that feed into these wrecks, i.e., a lack of qualification, poor hiring, et cetera?
Dirk Derrick (11:01):
There's instances where a driver who's properly hired, properly trained, everything just makes a bad decision. There are situations where cars pull in front of trucks where there's nothing they can do, but there's also situations where trucking companies hire people they shouldn't hire. They are required to look at past driving records. They are required to look past employer's records, medical examinations of these drivers. All of that determines whether or not somebody's qualified to drive a large tractor trailer truck.
(11:32):
A company gets in trouble when they have someone driving their truck who has a bad record, DUI, speeding, shouldn't be in the truck. If they have someone that they can't prove they have trained properly, or if they have somebody who has medical conditions that should prevent that person from getting their CDL license and being in that truck, then the company's going to have a liability, not just the truck driver.
(11:55):
And we're gonna dig into it. I mean, on the kinds of wrecks that are caused by user error or by driver error, one of the things we're gonna dig into are those things. Let's look at his past, let's look at his training, let's look at his medical history to see whether or not the company knew or should have known person should be driving.
Pearl Carey (12:14):
So how do things like dispatch practices and internal pressure from companies impact or perhaps cause some of these truck crashes?
Dirk Derrick (12:22):
This is where you often find out the root of what is causing the wreck. The FMCSA causation study found that when truckers felt pressure by the carriers to go harder, get there faster, it often led to more wrecks. That pressure comes about scheduling so tight that you gotta really push yourself, whether you're overdriving your hours or speeding. It comes when companies' policies reward bad behavior by rewarding people doing things extremely fast when they should know or they knew or should have known that you can't do it at that speed. It can be caused by a company's failure to act when somebody has repeated violations and they don't do anything about it.
(13:11):
Finally, it can be some company liability when they fail to preserve some evidence when a wreck occurs. When a wreck occurs, a tractor trailer wreck, one of the first things we do is we send a letter of preservation because you've got EDR systems, you've got data systems in these trucks that can show us what was going on before this wreck happened. You often have GPS systems that can show you the speed and how long it's been the time they left X and got to Y. So a lot of these trucks have data on them that can show everyone what actually happened leading up to the wreck. Company can have some responsibilities if that goes missing after a wreck. We try to get a letter of preservations out immediately after wreck to preserve that. And if we can get the preservation in their hands, they're under a legal duty to preserve that evidence. But if they don't, they can have some negative consequences because of it.
Pearl Carey (14:10):
That can pose a problem. So we've kind of come to the conclusion that these tractor trailer crashes can be caused by a combination of factors, both on the individual scale and on a company scale. So is there anything else that you would like to add?
Dirk Derrick (14:24):
No. And like I said, to start off with, what I'm telling us as far as the data and what happens, it's not a ... I'm not trying to dog all truck drivers. We need truck drivers, but we need them to drive safely. And it is often driver error, but a lot of times that driver error is caused by pressure from the trucking company. And when a trucking accident happens or a trucking wreck happens, it's different than working up a regular car wreck because we're going to dig down deep and look at every one of those federal regulations and see if there's any violations that kind of put that driver in a bad situation to cause a wreck.
Pearl Carey (15:01):
Absolutely. Well, Dirk, thank you so much for joining me today on this episode of The Legal Truth. And thank you so much to our listeners for tuning in for yet another episode. For more information, you can visit derricklawfirm.com/legaltruthpodcast, and I hope to see you in the next one. Bye.
Voiceover (15:23):
Thank you for joining us on the Legal Truth Podcast. If you have questions that you would like answered on a future episode, please send them to thelegaltruth@Derricklawfirm.com. If you would like to speak to us directly, call us at 843-248-7486. If you find the podcast valuable, please leave us a five-star review and share the legal truth with your neighbor, friend, or family member who is seeking reliable information about a South Carolina personal injury or workers' compensation claim.
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Dirk J. Derrick of the Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers is responsible for the production of this podcast, located at 901 North Main Street, Conway, South Carolina.
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Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers has included the information on this podcast as a service to the general public. Use of this podcast and any related materials does not in any manner constitute an attorney-client relationship between Derrick Law Firm Injury Lawyers and the user. While the information on this podcast is about legal issues, it is not intended as legal advice and should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your particular state. Anyone seeking specific legal advice or assistance should retain an attorney. Any prior results mentioned do not guarantee a similar outcome. The content reflects the personal views and opinions of the participants in the podcast and are not intended as endorsements of any views or products.
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This podcast could contain inaccuracies. The information contained in this podcast does not constitute legal advice and is not guaranteed to be correct, complete, or up-to-date as laws continue to change.
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In this podcast, you'll hear information about focus groups. Please note that not all of the firm's cases are presented to a focus group. Additionally, when speaking about juries or jurors in relation to a focus group, we are speaking of focus group participants and not actual trial juries or jurors.