Articles Posted in Georgia truck accidents

Monday morning on Highway 49 near Milledgeville, a tractor trailer came over a hill and struck two other cars, then went into the opposite lane where it struck an oncoming vehicle. Rita Rose, 31, of Warthen, Georgia, was killed when the 18 wheeler struck her head on.

Further details were not mentioned in early media reports. Often such incidents are not just simple collisions, but the roots of tragedy are found in a pattern of corporate conduct that forces truck drivers to meet impossible delivery schedules and press on when they are outside their legal hours of operation and impaired by fatigue.
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The week of the Master’s golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia, was kicked off with two truck crashes on Monday, April 5th.

In one, a woman was slowing to turn from Mike Padgett Highway onto 4-H Road when she was rear-ended by a speeding tractor trailer. She was reported to be in critical condition at Medical College of Georgia Hospital.

Fortunately, no injuries were reported when a dump truck jack-knifed and crashed on Bobby Jones Expressway.

Several readers of the Augusta Chronicle online edition commented about speeding log, chip and dump trucks in the area.
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As a Georgia trucking accident attorney, I expect accidents involving truck drivers who are extremely fatigued, cheating on their driving hours, distracted, or impaired by medications or by amphetamines used to stay awake. I expect mechanical and maintenance issues. I just don’t expect interstate truck drivers to be drunk behind the wheel. I know and respect a lot of truckers, and expect better than that.

But there are exceptions. On New Year’s Eve, a trucker from Texas was charged with DUI and vehicular homicide after he struck a Michigan couple’s car and killed the wife, as he got off the I-75 exit at Sam Nunn Parkway in Perry, Georgia.

Janice Hanes, 65, of Fenwick, Michigan, was declared dead at the hospital in Perry. Murray Hanes, 66, her husband, was transported by ambulance to The Medical Center of Georgia in Macon with head injuries.

Luis Lopez Guzman Jr., 50, of San Antonio, also was charged with DUI and leaving the scene of an accident. He was driving a 2000 Kenworth tractor-trailer when he struck the Hanes’ pickup truck. According a news report by Becky Purser on Macon.com, he fled the scene and was apprehended on I-75 headed south toward Florida. The news reports do not identify the company for which he was driving.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations are quite strict about use of alcohol by truck drivers. 49 C.F.R. § 392.5 bans use or possession of alcohol in operation of a commercial motor vehicle. “No driver shall . . . [u]se alcohol, . . . or be under the influence of alcohol, within 4 hours before going on duty or operating, or having physical control of, a commercial motor vehicle; or . . . [u]se alcohol, be under the influence of alcohol, or have any measured alcohol concentration or detected presence of alcohol, while on duty, or operating, or in physical control of a commercial motor vehicle.” Any driver is violation of this is placed in “out of service status” for 24 hours. “No motor carrier shall require or permit a driver to . . . [v]iolate any provision [of this section or] [b]e on duty or operate a commercial motor vehicle if, by the driver’s general appearance or conduct or by other substantiating evidence, the driver appears to have used alcohol within the preceding 4 hours.”

Intoxication of a truck driver is grounds for punitive damages in a personal injury case and in a survival action by the estate of a decedent in Georgia. While a wrongful death claim in Georgia does not include punitive damages, the measure of damage is the full value of the life of the decedent, including both economic and intangible aspects of life.
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I first learned of a fatal log truck accident in the Savannah area last week when a Savannah newspaper reporter phoned me for background information on log truck regulations in Georgia.

Police investigators in Garden City, Georgia, found 24 safety violations on a log truck that lost its load of logs, which crushed and killed a pedestrian.

The log truck was driven by Daniel Morris of Uvalda, Ga. He reportedly swerved as he neared an intersection, dislodging the trailer of logs. Neal James Hamilton, 57, of Lansing, Mich., was crushed by the falling load of logs.

Violations on the log truck included faulty brakes, balding tires, improper lights, failure to secure the load of logs properly, and a defective fifth wheel that attached the trailer to the truck.

Log trucks in Georgia are regulated by the Georgia Forest Products Trucking Rules. Those rules are relatively lax when compared with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, but it sound like even those weak rules were ignored in this case.

The victim was from Lansing, the capital of Michigan, where I recently took the deposition of an expert witness at Michigan State University.
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A speeding tractor trailer crash on I-95 in Georgia rammed the rear of a Ross Township, Pennsylvania family’s van Sunday afternoon, killing a 3-year-old child.

Sean Thornton, the youngest of three children of Daniel and Susan Thornton, was killed in his child car seat when a big rig slammed into the rear of the family minivan and pushed it off the road into the woods. It came to rest in cold marsh water. The family was en route to a post-Christmas Florida vacation.

The child’s mother, Susan Thornton, 38, was driving. According to KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh, the impact badly mangled her foot and it may have to be amputated. The father, Daniel Thornton, 47, has a broken jaw. The five-year-old sister has a broken foot, leg and arm. An eight-year-old brother has a cracked skull.

According to Georgia State Patrol spokesman Thornell King, the Thornton family’s 2007 Toyota Sienna van had slowed due to traffic congestion when it was struck in the rear at a high rate of speed by the 1999 Freightliner tractor-trailer truck hauling a load of paper products, driven by Willie Hill, 50, of Jacksonville.

Hill reportedly had picked up a load at Riceboro, en route to Gulfport, Mississippi. Riceboro is the site of a large Interstate Paper plant producing linerboard.

Media reports show a double trailer in the woods. News reports do not identify the trucking company involved.

I bet the family has been directly solicited by lawyers trolling the hospital or sending them promotional packages, in direct violation of bar rules that would subject them to disbarment if reported.
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A 25 year old Hahira woman was killed on October 20th when an 18 wheeler from Ohio ran a stop sign and her car crashed under the side of the trailer.

Christian Jennings at WALB-TV in Albany, reported that Julie Tyler, who made pictures of school children as a photographer for LifeTouch Portraits, was killed instantly in a side underride with a big rig operated by William Fishbaugh, 61, of Ohio. He was held at the Worth County jail on charges of running a stop sign, reckless driving and first degree vehicular homicide.

According to Georgia State Trooper Scott McClure, “The tractor trailer drug the vehicle down the road about 500 feet.” McClure continued, “He was unfamiliar with the area, but that’s more reason to pay attention while you’re out driving.” .

Fishbaugh is a driver for Dutch Maid Logistics, Inc., based in Willard, Ohio. Dutch Maid is an interstate motor carrier with 91 power units, specializing in refrigerated shipments of fresh produce.

A troubling piece of information is that Dutch Maid has had dramatically unsatisfactory driver safety ratings for each of the last six biannual reporting periods. Moving violation data on Dutch Maid during that time period does not identify individual drivers. Reports of out of service violations by Dutch Maid drivers have primarily involved violation of driver impairment, fatigue and hours of service rules.

Earlier this year, Dutch Maid lost an appeal of a suit against its former insurance carrier over liability insurance issues arising out of a 2001 Michigan crash caused by an inattentive Dutch Maid driver in which two people were killed.

Dutch Maid Logistics is also a defendant in another negligence lawsuit in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 2008.
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While I am an Atlanta trucking trial attorney now, many years ago I was a child at Mentone, Alabama, frequently trekking to Chattanooga with my parents. Our usual route was through Dade County, separated from the rest of Georgia by Lookout Mountain,(historically known as “the independent state of Dade”). While our route was on old two-lane U.S. 11, I was fascinated by the early stages of construction of I-59.

Recently on the short section of I-24 from Chattanooga to Nashville that dips down into Dade County, Georgia, a truck going too fast for rainy conditions lost control, hit another vehicle. Both vehicles crossed into the eastbound lanes and struck two more vehicles. Seven seven people were injured, and some were transported to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga. There is no word on their conditions.

The report from WRCH-TV in Chattanooga doesn’t specify what type of truck was involved. If it was a commercial truck governed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations, then 49 C.F.R. § 392.14 requires that “extreme caution in the operation of a commercial motor vehicle shall be exercised when hazardous conditions, such as those caused by . . rain . .. ”
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Crashes involving specialty trucks of various sorts — crane trucks, concrete mixer trucks, dump trucks, etc. — are often part of my trucking accident personal injury and wrongful death law practice in Georgia. Each type of specialty truck involves somewhat different issues.

Yesterday in Walker County — near where I attended school for six years in Chattooga County — 3 members of one family were killed when a bucket truck used for tree trimming crossed the center line of Highway 136 and struck two vehicles.

The three family members were airlifted to Erlanger Hospital in Chattanooga but did not survive. They were Anthony Thomas Hixson Jr., 36., of LaFayette, his 13 year old daughter, and his brother-in-law, James Eugene Whitaker, 45, of Ringgold.

The bucket truck belonged to Townsend Tree Service, an Indiana based company that has a large fleet of bucket trucks used for tree-trimming, clearance and vegetation management services for power and communication lines, pipelines and roadways. Townsend’s registered agent for service of process in Georgia is two blocks from my office.
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