Non Preventable Incident

OP if the witness and the accident reconstruction supports your son the case is OVER. Yes it is true that if the other vehicle was towed or someone was hurt this will be a DOT RECORDABLE accident. There is no such thing as a reportable accident. The authority holder will be required to list the accident in their accident register. There should be no blow back to your son. Most carriers list these accidents as non preventable incidents and most won't even report them. Just tell your son to get all the documentation he can get his hands on. I hope plenty of photographs were taken.

 

The same exact thing happened to me only not a Mercedes. I had my turn signal on though and I was stationary in bumper to bumper traffic. They tried to blow past me and fill a gap in front of me and I was about to attempt a lane change.

Showed the DOT officer my drive cam footage and everything. He said your turn signal was on? So you were changing lanes then when this occurred... no matter how many times I tried to explain that I wasn't even moving and was in my lane stationary, he still didn't believe it. The damage even clearly showed that I would have had to have been backing up to cause those scrapes etc.

Then he did the inspection and noticed my hub oil seal was missing. Boom, failed inspection. Placed out of service right there on the road. When he gave me the inspection report, he listed it as a crash caused by an improper lane change and also that I am out of service because of the hub oil seal and leaking oil. Hazmat had to be called for literally less than an ounce of oil that hadn't even hit the ground. And they treated me like I didn't do a pretrip at all and just neglected my truck. Thing is, it was inspection blitz week and I had a clean level one inspection about 12 hours before that.

But at least my company will have my back right? Wrong. They listed it as a preventable crash. 5 CSA points for the company, a preventable DOT reportable crash in which hazmat was leaked.

My company risk assessment is now 41. Anyone who works for Swift that hears 41 will think I drove up on a sidewalk in a school zone while texting and drinking a beer. Nope. I got sideswiped while minding my own business and bobtailing line 5 to go visit my dad who I hadn't seen in a few years. I wasn't even on duty anymore for the day.

Safety said I had already driven for 10 hours and my 14 was up when I left the terminal to drive the hour to my dad's house and had I not left the terminal, I wouldn't have been there to get hit. So it's all my fault.

Ah, but wait it gets better... we also have a sort of peer review board type thing where other drivers will hear my side of the story and view the evidence along with safety and help make a determination as to whether I could prevent it.

That's it... surely other drivers will hear me out and have some experience with exactly this scenario right... right?

Nope. Wrong. They said if I had checked my blind spot mirror every 4-6 seconds and increased my following distance, I would have known that guy was there, made even more space for him to cut me off and it wouldn't have happened. They too said if I had stayed at the terminal it wouldn't even be an issue.

So basically, in trucking you aren't at fault unless you were trucking when an accident occurred. If you were trucking, it's your fault.

 

Can't even begin to count the number of disconnected office twits that love to spout the "There's no such thing as a non-preventable accident, you could ALWAYS have done something different driver!" line!

Because I personally am FULLY responsible for every deicision made by EVERY idiot in EVERY vehicle on EVERY road thoughout my day!

 

I would not call them twits, but I agree some of these safety people can sometimes get full of themselves and get lost in their verbosity. The best safety person I ever had the privilege to meet said it in a few words. ( What I want my drivers to understand is there are at fault accidents and non fault accidents. I just want to make sure a driver even one involved in a non at fault accident comes away a better driver.) To this end this man would always ask a driver was there anything you might have did differently that would have avoided the crash? Not a come to my office so I can scream at you, but a lets go to the break room have a cup of coffee and talk about things. The world of trucking lost a fine person when that man died in 2003. I feel like if not for my epilepsy and losing my drivers license I would today be working in a safety dept and would hope to just be half the man that guy was.

 

I think what I learned from my accident, though not at all at fault(no matter what those ######## say) is that even though I had driven that stretch of road thousands of times over 20 years, having not been there for even a few weeks, the road was torn apart and divided into two eastbound highways, with a jersey barrier between them and it confused me with the signage, so I ended up taking the wrong one, which put me in the spot I was in and needing to change lanes. So lesson number 1 is that no matter how many times you have driven a road and think you know the route, don't get complacent and ####y because it will bite you in the ###. Normally it may be just an inconvenience. For me, it will be carrying a preventable DOT reportable accident around for God knows how long.

And the second lesson, probably more important than the first, is don't change lanes unless you absolutely have to. I spent the next few weeks just letting people pass me or even staying behind people that I would normally blow by without a second thought, because changing lanes is actually one of the most dangerous things we do. Especially in traffic. Had I not changed lanes to pass some old creeping granny, I wouldn't have ended up where I did... and my hubris, thinking I knew that road better than people who drive it every day NOW, simply because I drove it every day years ago, but me in the ### big time.

Still wasn't my fault, but I wouldn't have been in that exact spot if not for those two things there. Still, it was their responsibility not to hit me while I was maintaining my lane in traffic and waiting for an opening to get over.

 

Back in the 80s a year or two after I got out of the Air Force I was working some hauling sand and gravel in a small dump truck. This was way before the new CDL law and I could legally drive this dump truck with my regular Georgia Operators License. One of the other trucks that the man I was working for had was a large Mack with a dump body. These trucks did not have governors on them and the drivers run them wide open. Out on a 2 lane state highway a lady was (illegally) backing out onto the road. She had 2 small children in her car. The driver of the dump truck was estimated to be going somewhere near 90 MPH in a curve when he came upon this car backing out. All 3 people in the car was killed instantly and the driver of the dump truck spent a while in the hospital from injuries he got from leaving the road after the crash and went into a large wooded area. I will never forget what I heard the man that owned the truck say the next morning. Hey my driver did nothing wrong and the fault lies with the lady backing out into the road. There was a lawsuit filed by the family and they won it based not on fault, but on contributing reasons. I have tried to tell truckers for years now. Don't get lost in this fault no fault game. When those lawsuits start flying sometimes the contributing reasons can become an albatross around your neck! These Attorneys that file these suits are slick, well financed and know those FMCSA rules and regulations backward and forward. EVEN if you are later deemed to not be at fault these Attorneys if they find a smallest sliver of a thread will pull and pull until they find something. I know for a fact there are people that come in these boards that have seen this first hand. I know for a dang fact I have. Watch your speed. Do your pre/post trips. keep ALL your paperwork current. Maintain your lane. Watch your following distance. Make sure your ICC bumber on the back of the trailer is down properly and not bent all to hell. If you are tired pull over. Don't give these ####### Attorneys any grounds to come after you EVEN if you are not at fault. This is why a good safety dept will want to speak with you at some point later.

 

Buy him a dash cam for Christmas! It will definitely come in handy one of these days

 

Dash cams today are easy to use and pretty reliable and faultless. Pretty much set them to your preferred modes and forget it, even after powering down and back up.

And for drivers who change trucks regularly, they're very small to pack away, and easy and quick to stick to windshield, plug it in to cigarette lighter hole and forget about it. Main thing is to try and keep it easily accessible from the driver seat in the event you want to save a segment manually with a button press.