Accidents With Tractor-Trailers: An Everyday Occurrence in Florida
Unfortunately, accidents involving passenger cars and tractor-trailers are an everyday occurrence in Florida. According to news4jax.com, early yesterday morning, Charles Davis, Jr., a 25-year-old resident of St. Augustine was involved in an accident with a tractor-trailer driven by 39-year-old resident of Cassellberry, Britt Wortman. Apparently, Mr. Wortman was making a U-turn at the intersection of Factory Outlet Drive and State Road 16 and turned into the path of Mr. Davis' car. Mr. Davis was taken to Orange Park Medical Center in critical condition.
Very Familiar Accident Circumstances
The preceding circumstances are very familiar to our firm: we recently represented a young woman that crashed her Honda Civic into the side of a tractor-trailer that made an improper U-turn in front of her on Okeechobee Road. The victim's car was left unrecognizable and she had to be cut out of the vehicle by rescue personnel. The young lady suffered multiple catastrophic injuries, including a traumatic brain injury. For more details on this and other commercial truck accident cases handled by our firm over the years, please visit the Notable Cases section of our website.
Commercial Trucks Keep Getting Larger
When it comes to businesses, there is no greater motivator than profit, which in this case increases as trucking companies are able to move more merchandise per truck. Consequently, commercial trucks keep getting bigger (and heavier) with each passing year. Just to give our readers an idea of the rate of growth of tractor-trailer trucks in the last 50 years, please note that while the combined length of an eighteen-wheeler in the 1960's was about 40 feet, today it can be 57 to 59 feet long.
However, while building larger commercial trucks allows trucking companies to carry more merchandise, it also has other consequences: longer breaking distances because of the trucks' extra weight and greater difficulty driving them because of their ever-increasing length. This greater difficulty to drive these larger vehicles may have been a contributing cause to the accidents mentioned above.
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