Truck accidents in Texas, and why they are not car accidents

A second rulebook, and it is federal

A commercial driver crossing state lines answers to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration as well as to Texas traffic law. That second rulebook covers how long they may drive, how the vehicle must be inspected and maintained, how the load must be secured, and what the company must check before putting them behind the wheel.

Every one of those rules is a place a claim can be proved. A driver over hours is not a judgment call about carelessness, it is a regulation with a number attached, and the log says whether they broke it.

The driving limits worth knowing: eleven hours of driving inside a fourteen hour window, after ten consecutive hours off.

The money is on a different scale

An interstate carrier hauling general freight over 10,001 pounds must maintain at least $750,000 in liability coverage. Tankers and hazardous loads carry higher floors.

Set against the Texas car minimum of $30,000 per person, that is the difference between a claim that ends at the emergency room bill and one that can absorb a surgery and a career. It is also why the carrier’s insurer sends an investigator to the scene the same day, sometimes before the vehicles are moved.

The figure has not been raised since 1980, so on a catastrophic injury even $750,000 can be a ceiling rather than a cushion.

More than one company is usually liable

The truck, the trailer, the cargo and the driver frequently belong to different businesses, and each is a separate defendant with a separate policy. Sorting out who employed whom is early work, not paperwork.

• The motor carrier, for its own negligent hiring, training or supervision
• The driver’s employer, where the driver was leased from another company
• The trailer’s owner, where it was interchanged
• The shipper or loader, where the load shifted or was overweight
• A maintenance contractor, where a defect caused the crash

The evidence deletes itself

This is the part that decides most truck cases, and it happens in the first weeks while nobody is thinking about litigation.

Electronic logging devices record duty status, and the retention period for those records is measured in months, not years. Onboard telematics, engine control module data, dashcam footage and dispatch messages sit on company systems with their own retention schedules. A carrier deleting on schedule is not destroying evidence, it is following its policy, and once it is gone nobody can produce it.

A spoliation letter, sent to the carrier and its insurer, puts them on notice to preserve all of it. It has to be sent early and it has to be specific about what it covers.

What to do in the first week

Photograph the tractor and trailer including the USDOT number on the door, then look the carrier up in the federal SAFER database, which is public and shows its safety record and crash history.

Then get the preservation demand out. Everything else in a truck case can be reconstructed later. The logs cannot.

Whether a specific carrier, broker or shipper is liable on your facts is a question for an attorney licensed in Texas.

Truck accidents in Texas, in the federal record

Truck accidents beyond Texas

• Truck accidents nationally. The federal rules a carrier runs on, who else can be liable and what records exist are the same in every state.
• Truck accidents in Houston . The counties that city sits in, and what is reported there.
• Texas crash statistics. The fatal-crash record for the whole state, by year and by county.