Ambulance Chasing Lawyers – Trying To Get Rich Off Trucking

This morning when I started my daily routine of searching for news articles about trucking and the drivers and the industry, one particular news article caught my attention fairly quick. It was titled “Trucking firm involved in 11-person fatal crash had poor safety rating.” The courier journal from Louisville, KY. reported that the trucking company involved in the crash on I-65 that killed 10 people and the truck driver, had a poor safety rating with the FMCSA.

As soon as I read the article I knew this was going to add a bad mark on the trucking industry because I knew that every news site in the country would be running this story. And people that are not in or around the trucking industry were going to think that all trucking companies and their drivers were bad. To top it off the article even quotes a “top safety” executive for the American Trucking Association. Which everybody in trucking knows the ATA is not for truck drivers, but is for companies that belong to their association, and for shippers and receivers.

The “top safety” executive said that the Alabama based trucking companies safety rating was so bad that it “should not have been on the road.” What they fail to disclose is that the company only has twenty five trucks, and thirty drivers, in which case one or two bad drivers could drive the rating up. And to condemn the entire fleet on “could” is just crazy.

Now back to what I was originally going to write about. I searched the trucking news this evening and ran across a real jewel of an article. Written by an ambulance chasing lawyer trying to get rich off trucking. In his article he writes that according to the AP report Hester Inc. had been involved in at least one fatal crash before the one on Friday.

This is NOT true, as this lawyer writes about it. Here is what the AP report actually says: “Hester hadn’t had a fatal accident since at least 2007, federal records showed. During that time, the company had three wrecks, just one involving injuries. The report does not include the names of drivers or their safety records.” I have linked to the AP report for you to read.

This crude lawyer goes onto write that the truck was also “cited for problems with its lights, brakes and emergency equipment during six roadside stops since 2008.” But neglects to add that the truck had no citations in 2009, and 2010 including a “clean roadside inspection” performed a month before this accident. Then, this ambulance chaser leads into a sporadic number of lies by saying that trucks cause far more fatalities, which if Mr. ambulance chaser would do his research would have found that the NHTSA had just released a new report showing an all-time low in commercial vehicle fatalities.

In conclusion I want to say, yes lives where lost and will continue to be lost because of traffic accidents. Nothing can be done to prevent all accidents from occurring. It is something we have to deal with. There are precautions that we all can do, to help reduce the numbers, but an accident is just that, an accident. “An accident is a specific, identifiable, unexpected, unusual and unintended external action which occurs in a particular time and place, without apparent or deliberate cause, but with marked effects.”

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