If you’re an experienced driver, you probably get out on the highway sometimes and see the big semis cruising along, presumably with their cargo areas full of freight. These 18-wheelers might have furniture in them, or food for grocery stores, or sporting equipment, or just about anything else. These trucks help America run. Without them, many stores couldn’t stock the physical goods they sell.
While you must admit we need these trucks, they pose a danger to some drivers. If you have a trucker who follows all the laws and behaves responsibly, then they’re no worse than any individual puttering along in their family sedan. However, commercial trucks can sometimes weigh 80,000 pounds. If you ever have a driver who nods off behind the wheel or changes lanes without signaling, they can injure or kill someone a lot easier than someone driving a smaller vehicle might.
In this article, we’ll talk about commercial truck accidents. They can change your life instantly, and not usually for the better.
If you’re a driver who obeys all traffic laws, you can still get in an accident. Another driver might appear out of nowhere and hit you. It happens all the time. If it does, you can blame bad luck if you did nothing wrong.
With commercial trucks, you never know how an accident might occur, but often, you will see the same behaviors that cause them. Many times, these behaviors mimic those smaller vehicle drivers do. There is a difference, though, and that’s the vehicle’s size when you have a commercial truck on the scene.
Many times, a commercial truck will hit a smaller vehicle if they change lanes without checking to see if there’s a car close to them. Commercial trucks have blind spots, just like smaller cars do. Semis have them to the driver’s left around the vehicle’s midpoint, but also directly in front and right behind them.
If a trucker doesn’t realize you’ve pulled up alongside them or you’re in back or right in front of them, they might hit you before they even know you’re there. When that happens, a simple nudge can total your car and put you out of commission for months or permanently.
You might also have a truck driver who doses off for a moment behind the wheel and loses control if they’ve gone for multiple days with little sleep. Laws dictate truckers must stop and get some sleep during a 24-hour period, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re all following those edicts.
Truckers who consume drugs or alcohol can also cause a wreck. In that respect, they’re just like any other motorists.
If a commercial truck hits your car, it can cause a rollover situation. If that happens, consider yourself lucky if you walk away without serious injuries. In many cases, if a trucker hits your car and you careen off the highway or down an embankment, you might sustain a TBI, break some bones, or suffer internal injuries.
They might also total your car. If that happens, it might anger you, but if the collision didn’t harm you very much, you can feel good about the car taking the brunt of the impact.
After a commercial truck hits you, you must determine the extent of the damage. You might replace your car if the accident totaled it. Hopefully, your insurance will cover that. If you’re in an at-fault state, and you feel sure the trucker caused the accident, then you should look to their insurance for payment.
You can probably fix or replace your car easily enough. If the crash injured you, though, you may feel lasting pain from your injuries. You must probably head to a hospital directly after the accident so a doctor can look you over. They might do some X-rays or say you should get an MRI if you report pain from a particular body part.
You may require surgery to repair broken bones or if you sustained a head injury. A commercial truck accident that impacts your skull might require an emergency operation if you have intracranial bleeding.
Even if you don’t need an operation, you may require physical therapy if the crash injured you, but there’s no surgery possible that can help you. A doctor might give you prescription pain medication instead. If they give you opioids, though, you must exercise caution since those carry a high dependency or addiction risk.
You might find that you must miss some work during the weeks and months following the accident. If so, you must look into disability payments to help cover the medical bills that will pile up.
You might consider suing the truck driver or the company that employs them if the crash injured you permanently and you’re certain the trucker caused the wreck. You may hire a personal injury attorney and go after them in court. If you win some money, you can use that to pay for medical bills and to cover your lost wages, but perhaps you can never go back to the same job in some circumstances.
You usually will not know how your life will change directly after a commercial truck accident. You must probably wait for a while before you learn whether you can ever go back to your previous day-to-day existence.
If you can fix your car, you sustained only minor injuries, and you can get back to work quickly after the accident, then you can thank whatever force in the universe watched over you. If the accident permanently changed your life, you might feel depressed or wonder why things happened like they did.
There is no easy answer in those situations. You must try to reclaim your life as best you can, whether that requires therapy, various forms of medical intervention, or whatever other options present themselves.
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