Tractor trailer catches fire on loading dock of Rocky Hill, CT. warehouse

in my local news, way too many times, "tractor-trailer crash (or roll over)"....or "big truck crash"

only to find that many times, it is a 6 wheeler, or a pick up truck, pulling a boat or landscaping trailer....

 

When I was younger, I was a litigation paralegal for ten years. I did some trucking cases and a lot of maritime cases. There are probably at least three or four insurance policies, maybe more, covering different aspects of the trucking and storage liability for this incident. There's P&I, inland marine, warehouse legal, etc.

The warehouse owner should have policies to cover the building, the cargo stored there, and probably coverage for damages beyond the loss of the stuff itself (such as loss of profit or other consequential damages). The truck owner should have policies for the truck and trailer, the cargo, third-party damages (such as the fire burning the warehouse and the stuff in the warehouse), and so on. There are lots of different kinds of coverage that might come into play.

What happens next? The claim adjusters gather all the evidence to figure out who's at fault and how much the damages are. They will try to settle this among themselves without resorting to lawyers. If the liability is pretty clear (for example, there's a security camera that shows the truck starting on fire and the fire marshal signs a report that the point of origin was at the truck), then they'll argue about damages some and settle up with each other. (And maybe sue whoever made the truck or reefer unit or whatever to recover some of their costs.)

If liability is not clear, or if someone thinks that the damages being claimed are too high (that never happens ), and there's a decent amount of money at stake (say over $250k or more), and arbitration seems likely to fail, then they might get their lawyers involved. That raises the costs quite a bit, so they try to avoid it.

Who pays in this case? Impossible to say without more information. It will most likely hinge on where the fire started, how it started, how it spread, whether the driver or the warehouse employees could have stopped it at some point, etc. etc. etc. This is why there's always work for claims adjusters and lawyers who do insurance cases.

P.S. If you're the driver in a case like this, for goodness' sakes don't post about it publicly on the internet. Some jerk like me will find it and give it to a lawyer who will tear you up in a deposition with your words, no matter what you say. Keep your mouth shut.

 

Reading about this reminds me of a warehouse I went to a few days ago that has a policy that tells drivers not to leave the lights on while the trailer is being loaded or unloaded. Apparently it turns out that a few weeks prior to my visit there was an incident where a driver left his lights on while getting loaded and the heat from the lights on the trailer(in particular the clearance/marker lights at the top at the rear of the trailer)caused the rubber seal around the loading bay door to melt and eventually catch fire!

 

Who ever owns that trailer would have records of maintenance. Done or not done. To be honest I would not want to be the owner of that trailer right now it's too hot of a problem =)

You could have any number of problems that caused a docked reefer trailer to burn. Particularly those unattended, as in someone nursing the reefer engine and compressor etc.

I remember many old iron reefers howling at the cold storage in many places while beginning to show signs of pending failure in some way. Be it a fluid loss, oil loss, battery compromised or some other problem. All the reefers I have hauled, only one got sick and literally coughed at me and then dropped out of high range, refusing the load. (The imposed load necessary to cool and then quit all together) which meant the load temperature now begins to rise and there isnt much time to get things done. I think setpoint was 40 (Produce of Mexican origin) and Grand Junction was 48 degrees at 10PM that night it failed. I had two options Denver where it's going anyway in the mountain cold, valley rain between roughly 54 and 44 degrees on I-70 or Salt Lake City where it was about 43 that night.

I was tempted to take it into the colder Salt Lake to repair to minimize the temperature loss. But Denver was only 5 hours away in the night and they had someone at the trailer reefer dealer with a mobile truck and rack waiting on my arrival prior to sunrise. I was able to make delivery in a few hours after that. Load was 45, but reciever, a small mexican grocery ethnic store in the south central had no trouble with it. They certainly needed that particular produce. (Not to mention cash on delivery at about 1450 or so that I had to transfer to Denver FFE dispatch immediately. That was not money we wanted to be responsible for)

I think about all those old trailers back in the day that had trouble. Most of the time they simply quit. Forcing the cold storage to actually unload them to protect the freight. (This goes to a time where warehouses and cold storage abuses the trailers filled with cargo as free storage that they don't have to bother with today which raises another set of problems)

Finally but not last, I mentioned this a few times, but I'll say it again. Most cold storages have a windsock for primary wind direction. You will want to note that direction so you can head upwind should the ammonia or other chemical leaking coolant alarm goes off in that facility. It's not some place not to neglect the sitaution where you are and get really hurt or killed because you ran downwind instead.

Sometimes I think I should be in risk management of some kind. But no one spends money to pay people to work on that because most of the time there is nothing to manage.

 

Agreed. Nowadays, a lot of these reefer trailers are being monitored via satellite so all the companies know what temperature the reefer is set at, if it’s running in cycle or continuous mode, how much fuel it has or if there’s any alerts that pop up.And if there are any alerts that pop up the driver is notified usually by Qualcomm. Nowadays you can’t put a price on that type of sophisticated technology, especially if you have loads like produce that are temperature critical.

 

I remember tying trailers to their own qualcomm tracking in real time prior to going away with it to Detroit or some place wherever the medicines are going. Ive never been really clear on how that worked because you can only do so much with a 15 pin pigtail between truck and trailer. (Keep in mind this would be 2001 and earlier. Today's newer satellite stuff probably has wi fi or wireless hot spot to draw data from etc off the trailer) And the medicines usually had at least one tracker buried in particularly valuable pallets among many pallets so that if the bad guys did not know about these they would maybe still be traced and found with the goods.

At the end of day, what I would prefer a cold storage of food, grocery etc to do is unload the #### things right away. Holding on to trailers while loaded for hours is a form of abuse I would imagine causing the trucking company not to be able to run off with a now empty trailer to get a preplan load at a shipper somewhere else.

 

Gotta love those high dollar value loads. If people only knew how much a case of Similac will go for on the black market. LOL Looks like they were almost always guaranteed to have a tracking device put in somewhere. And of course don’t get me started on places that love to hoard trailers when you’re looking for one for the next load.(looking at you Kroger Shelbyville,Indiana-quit taking 2 to 3 days to unload your stuff from our trailers)

 

Actually, risk management is the definition of the mission of every trucking company's safety department. Other industries have similar functions, but it's obviously pretty intense in our business, since it is high risk and has lots of different kinds of risk.