A serious truck accident in the northwestern corner of Missouri has left the truck driver with serious personal injuries after his brakes stopped working. The crash is an example of how defective parts or mechanical failures can contribute to an accident.
Truck Accident in Northwest Missouri Hurts One
The incident happened in the afternoon of Tuesday, April 18, 2017, just to the east of Watson, Missouri, at the intersection of Route D and Route A and 70 miles northwest of St. Joseph.
23-year-old Robert Kopejtka, from nearby Rock Port, was driving a tractor-trailer northbound on Route D when his brakes failed near the intersection with Route A. His truck rushed through the intersection, skidded off the road, and slammed in an anhydrous ammonia tank on the other side of Route A. According to the police reports, the collision knocked the tank over, and Kopejtka was pinned inside the wreckage of his truck. He was flown to the hospital in Omaha, Nebraska, with serious injuries.
Mechanical Failures Cause Wrecks
Car accidents can happen in a variety of ways. By far the most common cause of a crash is driver error or negligence. However, there are also numerous crashes, like this one, that are caused by a mechanical failure or a defective vehicle.
A study done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and released in 2015 investigated the “critical reason” for 2,189,000 car crashes that happened between 2005 and 2007. While the “critical reason” was not necessarily the cause of the crash, the NHTSA described it as the “immediate reason for the critical pre-crash event and is often the last failure in the causal chain of events leading up to the crash.”
In 94% of the accidents covered in the study, the critical reason was assigned to a driver involved in the accident. However, the critical reason for 2% of the crashes – a total of 44,000 accidents – was assigned to one of the vehicles involved.
While this is a significant number, it likely downplays the role of mechanical failures and defects in car and truck crashes. There was no in-depth investigation of the crashes used in the study, so it only attributed the critical reason for a crash to the vehicle when the malfunction was easily visible.
Nevertheless, the study still found that, out of the number of times the vehicle was the critical reason for the crash, the problem was related to the brakes 22% of the time. This accounted for approximately 10,000 crashes.
St. Joseph Car Accident Attorneys at the Smith Law Office
The moment when your brakes fail can be one of the most terrifying one in your life. You could find yourself hurtling along the road and completely unable to stop or even slow down to avoid a collision.
When this happens, you can create a crash and get seriously hurt, despite being completely innocent. Because you were not the ultimate cause for the crash, you deserve to be compensated for your injuries. This is where the personal injury attorneys at the Smith Law Office in St. Joseph can help. Call our lawyers at (816) 875-9373 or contact us online for the legal help you need.