Head On Fatality

Knoxville TV station WBIR reported on a two-car collision in Madisonville, Monroe County, yesterday. William C. Kile, 76 of Sweetwater was driving along on Highway 68 when he was hit head on by a vehicle driven by a Utah man. According to the article citing Tennessee Highway Patrol Troopers, the Mazda driven by the man from Utah crosses the center-line and crashed into the vehicle driven by Mr. Kile who was pronounced dead at the scene. Unfortunately, Mr. Kile was not wearing his seatbelt. The investigation is continuing and the Utah man faces charges of failure to exercise due care. Our condolences go out to the family and friends of Mr. Kile.

This collision happened in a rural area and according to the Federal Highway Administration, rural road safety is a particular concern, because the majority of highway fatalities take place on rural roads. Rural roads account for approximately 40 percent of the vehicle miles traveled in the U.S., but almost 57 percent of fatalities. According to recent data, 23,260 people were killed in rural crashes in 2007 and the fatality rate for rural crashes is more than twice the fatality rate in urban crashes.

This moral of this story has two important aspects, the first is that all drivers are required to exercise due care when driving a motor vehicle on the highways of Tennessee. Due care in this situation requires a driver to keep his eyes on the road and to avoid distractions as he drives. From the facts given in the article it’s clear that either the driver intended to crash into Mr. Kile’s car or that he failed to exercise due care and allowed himself to be distracted and drifted into the other lane.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration the primary responsibility of the driver is to operate a motor vehicle safely. The task of driving requires full attention and focus. Anything that distracts drivers from this task, risking harm to themselves and others, should be avoided. Distractions can be from cellphone, talking and not watching, trying to reach inot the rear seat, adjusting the radio or fooling with a GPS device.

The second item is that no matter where we are driving we should use our seatbelts. Seatbelts help prevent death and injury in a number of different ways. They prevent you from being thrown from the car, they shift crash forces to the strongest part of the body structure and they spread crash forces over a wide area of the body and last but not least they keep the person colliding with hostile surfaces inside the vehicle. (ie. Steering-wheel, windshield and dashboard.)

Rural drivers are less likely to wear their seatbelts. 56 percent of rural passenger vehicle occupants killed were unrestrained as compared to 51 percent of urban passenger vehicle occupants killed.  Over two-thirds of rural pickup truck occupants killed were unrestrained – the highest percentage of any passenger vehicle occupants killed among both rural and urban areas. The lesson here is that safety starts when you get into the car and ends when the car is parked and the motor is shut off.

If you or a loved one was injured in a Nashville car crash, by a distracted driver, contact the experienced Nashville automobile accident lawyers at Phillip Miller & Associates and find out about your rights.

Tennessee Car Tractor-Trailer Accident

A Pennsylvania soldier stationed at Fort Campbell died in a mysterious accident early Sunday morning on I-24 in Clarksville, Tennessee. It’s accidents like this one, reported on the website of WSMV Channel 4 in Nashville, that cause me to ponder possible causes. According to the report Eric Thomas Rothharpt, 24 died when his Toyota Scion smashed into the rear-end of a tractor-trailer parked on the ramp with it’s flashers turned on because of a previous wreck. Police reported that the victim was not wearing his seatbelt when the collision occurred. The staff and attorneys at Phillip Miller & Associates send our deepest condolences to the family and friends of Mr. Rothharpt.

What causes an experienced Nashville automobile accident attorney like myself to ponder an accident like this is the question of how such an accident could have happened. You have a huge tractor-trailer parked off the roadway with its emergency lights blinking and yet the victim drives off the road and rams into it. My first thoughts were focused on whether this young man had been drowsy, fallen asleep and drifted off the road. Any investigation of this wreck should center on where he had been and what he had been doing prior to the collision. Had he been traveling some distance, been working long hours, there are many areas that need to be probed.

According to studies done by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) sleepiness impairs driving performance. Sleepiness leads to crashes because it impairs elements of human performance that are critical to safe driving. Relevant impairments identified in laboratory and in-vehicle studies include:

Slower reaction time. Sleepiness reduces optimum reaction times, and moderately sleepy drivers can have a performance- impairing increase in reaction time that will hinder stopping in time to avoid a collision. Even small decrements in reaction time can have a profound effect on crash risk, particularly at high speeds.

Reduced vigilance. Performance on attention- based tasks declines with sleepiness, including increased periods of nonresponding or delayed responding.

Deficits in information processing. Processing and integrating information takes longer, the accuracy of short-term memory decreases, and performance declines.

Working the night shift, overtime, or rotating shifts is a risk for drowsy driving that may be both chronic and acute. In a New York State survey, nearly one-half the drowsy drivers who crashed (and more than one-third of those who drove drowsy without crashing) reported having worked the night shift or overtime prior to the incident. In addition, a higher reported frequency of driving drowsy was associated with working a rotating shift, working a greater number of hours per week, and more frequently driving for one’s job.

My next thought was that he could have been distracted as he drove up the ramp. I would focus here on his cell phone to determine whether he had made or taken a text message or cell phone calls. The task of driving requires full attention and focus. Cell phone use can distract drivers from this task, risking harm to themselves and others.  Therefore, the safest course of action is to refrain from using a cell phone while driving. Research shows that driving while using a cell phone can pose a serious cognitive distraction and degrade driver performance.  The data are insufficient to quantify crashes caused by cell phone use specifically, but NHTSA estimates that driver distraction from all sources contributes to 25 percent of all police-reported traffic crashes.

If you or a loved one is injured in a Nashville car accident by a drowsy or distracted driver contact the experienced Nashville accident attorneys and Phillip Miller & Associates and find out about your rights and remedies.