Truck Injury Lawyer Blog : Truck Accident Lawyer & Attorney: Morgan Adams : Contingency Fee Truck Accident Lawyer

One of the areas lawyers, who don't handle a lot of truck wreck cases, have problems with in a trucking case are those cases that involve fire and explosion. Now don't flood me with emails, the lawyers can certainly say "my client burned to death." What I am talking about is the failure to consider a product liability claim against the manufacturer of the tractor. 

First consider that gas tanks in a car have been placed within the frame of the car for decades. Why? Because failure to do so causes fire and explosions in a wreck. Where are fuel tanks located on a truck? Outside of the frame, sitting there like a napalm bombs on a fighter jet. Manufacturers have know for years that this is dangerous situation and have refused to make changes. In fact they lobby congress to make sure rules that apply to make cars safer don't apply them.

These cases need to be brought to convince manufacturers to make safer tractors. Until they start making safer tractors drivers, whether car or truck, will unnecessarily be at risk. These cases should be considered even in single vehicle rollovers.

Morgan Adams is a trial attorney licensed in Tennessee and Georgia. He is listed as a "2008 Mid-South SuperLawyer" (Limited to the top 5% of the lawyers in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas), is a member of the Million Dollar Advocates Forum (limited to lawyers who have recovered 1 million dollars or more for their clients), and is the Chair-Elect of the American Association of Justice's Interstate Trucking Litigation Group. He has served as chair of the Tennessee Association of Justice's Trucking Litigation seminars since 2004, and is a frequent speaker at national continuing legal education programs on trucking liability cases.

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My friend Jeff Burns and I were talking the other day, Jeff also handle trucking cases, and we were talking about how long it has been since the minimum levels of insurance were adjusted on trucks and the impact that had on the public. Jeff pointed out that: 

Congress gave the Secretary of Transportation the authority to set the minimum level of insurance for tractor trailers, but the Secretary could go no lower than $750,000 for property carrying motor carriers. That was in the 1980 deregulation bill (The Motor Carrier Act of 1980). The idea was that since congress was deregulating and taking away a lot of the protections that had been present under the ICC the public deserved greater protection and that it created a barrier of entry into the trucking industry. In place of limited entry into the industry as had been the case under the ICC, Congress called for higher insurance, thinking that the insurance underwriters would not insure companies unless they were in fact safe.

The committee report stated:

"The carrier who wants to maintain high safety levels will be under pressure to cut his costs to meet the prices of his competitors will be under pressure to cut his costs by operating in violation of minimum safety standards.... Insurance companies are equipped to evaluate the performance of the motor carriers. The premiums they assess are in direct relation to the risks they assume. Therefore, an unsafe carrier will have an increased premium, and a totally unsafe carrier may not be able to obtain the insurance necessary to operate, or at best will be at an insurance cost disadvantage."

At that time there were around 27,000 authorized motor carriers. By the turn of the century, after deregulation, there were more than 500,000. Now, no one really knows but it is believed to be over 750,000.

It has been 29 years since the minimum insurance limit was increased. If you go to any present value calculator on the Internet and use a 4% inflation rate you will find that the present value of $750,000, 29 years from now, is about $240,000 in today's dollars. To put it another way, you would need $3,120,000 in today's dollars to equal $750,000 in 1980.

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The Commercial Motor Vehicle Safety Alliance (CMVSA) has set June 2-4 as the time to hold its Roadcheck 2009 event. This event asks for all states to inspect trucks. Less than 1% of trucks are inspected. By announcing the inspections 4 months in advance, the CMVSA gives drivers and trucking companies four months to prepare, or if the problems are serious enough, to simply stay off the road.

Despite huge publicity in the trucking industry, the 3 day inspection in 2008 found 23.9% of inspected drivers failed a Level 1 inspection. While ATA President and CEO Bill Graves said last year that the Federation was pleased “to see that the safety of the truck fleet continues to improve.” The president failed to point out that almost 1 in 4 trucks was in violation of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations! The fact that drivers are on the road in an unsafe condition, knowing that this special inspection will be run, shows how drivers believe the chances of being inspected is so rare that they believe they won't be caught, or that they are so ill trained that they think they are safe.

The trucking industry, far from crowing about a 23.9% failure rate on an announced inspection, should be ashamed of itself.

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The American Transportation Research Institute (ATRI) has just released a report on ice falling from tractor trailers so I thought I would supplement my earlier post. The report reaches no conclusions about this recognized problem but does provide a "compendium of currently available snow removal devices, which includes utilization levels and advantages and disadvantages of each." I have requested a copy of the report and will have more to add later. In the meantime lawyers handling these cases would be well served to seek out a copy of this report.

see: www.ATRI-Online.org

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