Had a wreck, needing advice on what to do now.

Yes, I heard it a little differently:

"A tractor-trailer will swerve for 3 things. 1) An object that will not move, like a bridge; 2) An object that will not move, like a tree; 3) See 1) and 2). The reason being that once you leave your lane, you are no longer in control, you have lost control. And you and your company are responsible.

If a car full of babies pulls in front of you and cuts you off, do not swerve. Square up and remain in control of your rig. You will save more lives that way, including (hopefully) your own."

Told to me many, many years ago.

A few months back I witnessed the following:

I looked up from my dash as I was heading out of town in a speed-trap section of local 2-lane highway as a parts van for a car dealership suddenly swung into a semi head-on in on-coming traffic. I came to a stop about 30 feet from the parts van, got up to the driver and he had no pulse. The semi driver was already on the phone to his company. There was nothing he could have done. The force of the wreck thrust his steering tires facing directly into my lane and the impact injured his knee so that he needed EMTs to get him out. Had he lost control and not come to a stop, he would have plowed right into me. I gave my report to the police and to the investigators for both sides in the following weeks.

The most important fact, in my opinion, was that the driver stayed fully in his lane.

 

Not so sure I agree. Something tells me when given the choice between squaring up into a car of babies and ditching the rig off the road, the latter of the 2 is likely to cause less harm.

 

Yes, I think you can get another job without too much of a problem. You may not get on with a large mega-carrier, but then who wants to?

Forget about what your previous company says, get the facts in-hand from the police report when you apply for another job. Forget that last company. Remember, those kind of companies are your friend (or so they smile at you and say you are) as long as you are profitable for them and do all they ask of you. As soon as something goes wrong or you cost them money...good bye. Remember, always keep the back door open....know what I mean?

You might have to try pulling a container, or go with a ma and pa company, or pull grain, or anything out there. Those companies you see in the trucker magazines are not the only ones out there. You may find that working for a small and different company was better that that one.

 

I wouldn't stay off the road to long,

time is against you, right now.

 

Thanks a lot man, made me feel a bit more optimistic. I could go get a cubicle job, hell I got an associates, but it just wouldnt be the same. Its in my blood and I really dont want to do anything else unless its an absolute only option. Appreciated.

 

Great discussion. OP: sorry that happened. I think something that hasn't been mentioned in all the armchair quarterbacking is that the OP presumed a multi-car incident had the encroaching 4-wheeler been "forced" into traffic.

Well, not only was that car probably equipped with it's own brake pedal, so was all them speeding cars in the thru traffic. Had the encroaching car chosen to hit the wall of cars instead of his brakes or the 18-wheeler, that traffic would have parted like the Red Sea did for Moses. Maybe one or two might have mixed it up, but so what? Log it on line 4 while you hang around being a witness, then get back on your way. Nobody is suggesting that you had to be a highway killer to keep your truck out of the grass. I like what MN said about you taking on someone else's responsibility. Very apt.

Another apt remark I've heard along the way came from one of the instructors at the CDL mill I hired for a refresher. Among other jobs, he had spent 10 yrs doing NYC local/regional delivery for one of the big beverage companies in a 53 footer. His sage advice when questioned on how to deal with congested traffic was, "You are the traffic."

Gashauler: Great add on about the integrity of shoulder pavement that bears repeating. That pavement is designed for emergency parking, and not near as sound or well maintained as the main road surface. Definitely a risk involved with rolling a 40T truck on it. Not to mention all the debris that collects there. Run over a piece of scrap metal that fell off another truck, or a trailer wheel some careless landscaper left behind after changing a flat, and you don't even need to run on weak pavement to cause your very own 1-truck accident after you lose a few tires all of a sudden.

The irony in all this is that it's usually easy to blame everything else for something like this. Much harder to realize that there was in fact some things you could have done yourself to avoid the outcome. That is, making it preventable. It has nothing to do with who is actually at fault.

Accidents are rarely spontaneous, discrete events. There is almost always a chain of little failures that result in the crash. Take any of those individual, often trivial events out of the chain, and the accident doesn't happen. This is usually detailed out very carefully in NTSB reports on aircraft incidents. Unfortunately, that amount of diligence is never applied or reported for road vehicles, except in the most egregious cases with fatalities or major damage.

 

From what I read,

it's not that bad..........

http://www.jjkeller.com/wcsstore/CVCatalogAssetStore/samples/forms/195-WSI-L.pdf

 

As has been stated before get a copy of police report and a copy of your DAC Report and see what it states. Send a copy of the police report to DAC. Then when you apply for a job show them a copy of police report and that way they can see what actually was reported.

 

See page 18, msg #171, paragraphs 8, 9, 'The Gordon Culture...':

 

There isn't a link, it's common sense.

If a DOT certified officer who is investigating an accident states that the accident is not preventable, then that's the ruling in the eyes of the law. No one else determines that.

The carrier may feel that the driver could've done more, and they can fire him for that, the same as they can fire anyone for any reason, or without reason (except for protected statuses). It doesn't matter if you think it was preventable, or if I did, or whatever. The investigating officer's decision is what the record shows.

If the official accident report states that is was non-preventable, then they company can't say that it was preventable on his DAC - that's false information which contradicts what the official report stated. Now, if the accident report does say that it was preventable, then the company can put that on his DAC.

That's why I stated that you he needs to get a copy of the official report. When it comes to his DAC and his career, nothing that anyone says here about what he did or didn't do matters - that accident report is what HireRight will use to determine if the information on his DAC is false or not.

If the DOT says it was non-preventable, that's all that matters in the eyes of the law.