Truck Rollovers

Everyday traffic congestion is plagued more and more by 18-wheelers. Many times in this clutter of vehicles, there are times when these huge vehicles need to stop quickly for quickly slowing traffic ahead of them or slowing traffic that wasn't obvious from a distance. It may be a rainy or snowy day when something ahead of them happens suddenly. This can turn into a tremendously scary situation for not only the driver of the truck, but all the vehicles in the truck's radius. When the brakes are pushed to their limit suddenly, the truck will often jackknife. Once the truck has jackknifed, a truck rollover can occur for various reasons. And for those in the trucks path, the danger is very real and can quickly turn traumatic. If you or a loved one has been injured due to a truck rollover, contact the truck accident legal team at our Fresno law firm now for help.

A jackknifes occurs when the back of the trailer comes around toward the cab, the driver has little or no control of the 18-wheeler that weighs tens of thousands of pounds sliding down the highway. Anything in its path is going to get hit and can act as a ramp causing a truck rollover. Once the truck rolls over, what little control the driver may have had is lost completely. Now other vehicles are at risk from not only getting hit and pushed, but landed on top of. Often, it happens so fast there is no time to move a car out of its way.
Truck rollovers may occur for reasons other than the weather. When truck drivers are aggressive because of very tight deadlines set by the companies, many will speed excessively to make up time on the road. The drivers are limited to 13 hours of straight driving time with a 10 hour downtime by federal law. They become exhausted from the long hours driving, so their reflexes are impaired. This deadly combination often results in loss of control from delayed reactions to traffic around them. For those in those surrounding vehicles, a recipe for disaster is brewing. 

Adding to these factors, in effort to make fewer trips and save on fuel, many trucks are loaded well over their weight limit. A vehicle as large as an 18-wheeler is hard enough to control under normal instances. With the added pounds, the shift of weight during an emergency stop or a curve sharper than what the driver perceived from a distance will also cause a truck rollover.

With only one of these factors, a truck rollover is a deadly accident to be faced with. When more than one of these issues is combined, it's a recipe for multiple deaths and severe, life altering injuries. Many times the driver is the one who takes the liability for a truck rollover. However, in some cases the company may also be held liable for truck rollover as well. 

If you have been one of the unfortunate in the path of a truck during a rollover, then you need to seek the counsel of a qualified truck accident attorney immediately. The legal team in our Fresno firm is ready and able to evaluate your claim and determine the best means by which to recover damages.