When Are Truck Drivers To Blame For West Virginia Truck Crashes?

Truck drivers are responsible for truck crashes when they fail to follow the law or exercise reasonable care during the operation of their vehicles. Even if the truck drivers do not deserve 100% of the blame, West Virginia follows the rules for modified comparative negligence. This means that so long as the people who get injured in a crash are not responsible for more than 50% of the blame, they can recover a share of their damages.

Notably, although all drivers must use “reasonable care,” what is reasonable under the circumstances may be different for truck drivers than for those operating sedans, SUVs or pickup trucks. This means that some of the things that you might do in your personal automobile might be unsafe for truck drivers to do in their commercial vehicles.

The Expectations Are Different For Truck Drivers

Trucks are obviously much longer than cars. They weigh much more, take longer to accelerate, take longer to stop and need more room to turn. For this reason, the standards are different. Even though the principles of reasonable care remain the same, truck drivers must follow federal regulations and industry standards of reasonable care, such as those set forth in the West Virginia Commercial Driver’s License Manual. This is a 195-page document that covers everything from pre-trip inspections and driving under various road conditions to avoiding drowsy driving.

The Commercial Driver’s License Manual is generally uniform across the different states, but it is quite a bit different than the standards you have in your personal vehicle. For example, the standards are quite different for how truck drivers are expected to inspect their vehicles prior to driving, take curves, maintain safe following distances and significantly reduce their speed in the face of hazardous conditions.

To get their commercial driver’s licenses, truck drivers must take a written test, much like you did before you got your license. Then they must get out on the road for more practice before they take an actual skills test. So, they should know the different standards and how they are expected to put them into practice.

As an example, the Commercial Driver’s License Manual discusses how a truck driver should calculate a safe following distance based on speed and truck length. As a general rule, a truck driver traveling under 40 miles per hour should leave one second of following distance for each ten feet of truck length. At higher speeds, truck drivers should add another second. This means that a driver traveling at 60 miles per hour in a 70-foot truck should generally leave about eight seconds of following distance between the truck and the vehicle ahead of it. It also means that if you’re traveling the West Virginia turnpike and see a truck driver leaving the same two to three seconds of following space you might leave, that driver is not demonstrating reasonable care.

Additionally, truck drivers must react appropriately to the changes in the weather and road conditions. Section 392.14 of the federal regulations says that truck drivers must exercise “extreme caution” when hazardous conditions exist, such as those caused by snow, ice, sleet, fog, mist,  rain, dust or smoke that  adversely affect visibility or traction. The regulations state that speed shall be reduced when such conditions exist. In heavy rain, industry guidelines require truck drivers to reduce their speed by about one-third. On packed snow, they should reduce their speed by one-half or more. The failure to do so is a failure to exercise reasonable care.

All of these expectations are different because the reality is that trucks are much larger and more dangerous than personal vehicles. If you make a mistake, the consequences are devastating. There’s so much more potential energy. If you calculate the potential energy of an 80,000-pound tractor-trailer rear-ending a car at 45 miles per hour, it’s equivalent to the potential energy of a car traveling at 200 miles per hour. When you consider the heightened dangers posed by large trucks, it reframes the idea of what “reasonable care” means for truck drivers.

Truck Crash Victims Need To Understand The Standards

After a truck crash, injury victims may want to hold the at-fault parties accountable for their negligence. To do this requires understanding and identifying negligent behaviors. Because truck drivers must follow different standards than other drivers, injury victims want to work with attorneys who truly understand the different ways truck drivers and trucking companies may fail to exercise reasonable care.

While operating a truck in a fashion that might be considered reasonable for the operation of a car, that doesn’t live up to the expectations set for operators of large commercial motor vehicles. In other cases, the driver may not even be at the wheel when he or she fails to show reasonable care. If a driver fails to perform a proper pre-trip inspection and, therefore, doesn’t notice the bald tires or out of adjustment brakes that lead to a crash, that’s still driver negligence.

Commercial drivers are highly trained, but driver error is more common than you might expect. A great number of truck crashes are avoidable, and if truck drivers would follow the training they received to get their commercial driver’s licenses, a great number of serious injuries and deaths could be avoided.