Pickup Truck and Semi-Truck Collide in Tragic Crash

MIDLAND, TX- Sanangelolive.com writes that two men are dead following a terrible and tragic wreck that took place in Midland County late last week.*

The crash involved an F-250 and an oilfield tanker truck that crashed and caught on fire. Reports indicate that the 30-year-old man operating the pickup truck was traveling the wrong direction on FM 1208. The two-vehicles struck one another head-on. 

The driver operating the pickup truck and the 44-year-old man driving the tanker truck both died in the horrific crash. The images from the scene show flames and billows of smoke rising from the tanker truck. 

Crashes that involve large trucks are often severe and deadly. Trucks weigh somewhere between twenty and 30 times that of passenger vehicles. Trucks are also higher off the ground, meaning that cars and smaller vehicles can become stuck beneath the side of a semi in an underride-related crash. 

Trucks also present risks of accidents because they must travel around twenty to 40 times as far as a smaller vehicle in order to complete a stop. The difference can be greater still if the weather is bad and roads are slick. The result is that if a truck driver needs to stop quickly, he may not be capable of doing so. 

In 2018, crashes involving large trucks killed 4,136 people. The majority of fatalities involved people in smaller cars that collided with larger semis. Only sixteen percent of those killed in truck crashes were people in large trucks. Fatal collisions involving trucks are increasing every year. Since 2009 the number has risen by 31 percent. When a car and a large truck collided in 2018, the victim was in the smaller car 96 percent of the time. 

Accident News is a safety and education initiative from Montlick & Associates, designed to help people better understand and thereby avoid common accident causes.  To learn more about our injury prevention programs, including iridesafe.com - click here. We hope you are never in an accident, but if you or family member are injured, call Montlick & Associates 24/7 for your free consultation at 1-800-LAW-NEED (1-800-529-6333) or use our live chat at Montlick.com.

Sources:https://sanangelolive.com/news/crashes/2020-01-13/dps-two-dead-after-pickup-collides-tanker-truck and https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/large-trucks