St Petersburg Truck Accident Attorney

November 25, 2024 |

According to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMSCA), close to 500,000 crashes involving large trucks are reported each year, with over 100,000 injuries and close to 4,500 fatalities.

To make matters worse, a large percentage of the injuries from truck accidents are severe and catastrophic life-altering events due to the size and weight of 18 wheelers, semi-trailers, and other large trucks.

Suppose you’re a victim of a truck accident. In that case, likely, you’ll quickly accrue large amounts of out-of-pocket expenses for hospitalization, doctor bills, testing, therapy, appliances, prosthetics, and rehabilitation that they’re not able to pay.

Severe truck accident injuries can also mean that you cannot work temporarily or permanently, making it even harder to make ends meet.

That’s why you need to hire an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney that knows how to collect a considerable amount of compensation for truck accident victims.

It’s essential to get your case started quickly before evidence is destroyed or deadlines are blown.

How A St. Petersburg Truck Accident Attorney Help You

Turning your case over to an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney is your first step towards having the peace of mind of focus on your healing. You’ll be able to hand over all your unpaid medical bills for assistance with processing under no-fault or other applicable insurance.

You’ll also get help applying for lost earnings benefits – what a weight off your shoulders!

You can relax while your St. Petersburg truck accident attorney’s well-trained team investigates all the possible parties responsible for your accident and puts them on notice to preserve evidence.

The goal is to prepare strong evidence for trial while negotiating a settlement along the way. If you receive emails, phone calls, or letters about the accident, you can turn them over for handling.

When you hire an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney, you can rest assured that they will do everything possible to collect the substantial amount of money you need to get back on your feet.

What Causes Truck Accidents?

To collect the extremely large amount of monetary damages required to fully compensate victims of truck accidents, the best St. Petersburg truck accident attorneys leave no stone unturned.

Truck accidents often have multiple causes that contributed to the accident, such as driver inattention, a design defect in the roadway, and a manufacturing defect in the truck’s brakes.

Each of these defendants has its pool of insurance and assets that can contribute to a settlement or verdict that can be transformative for a victim that’s severely or catastrophically injured. These are some of the most common causes that contribute to truck accidents:

Driver Fatigue

The FMCSA imposes strict rules on drivers of large commercial vehicles called “hours of service regulations” to keep fatigued drivers off the roadway, limiting drivers to 14 consecutive hours on the road, even if they take breaks and naps during that period.

Drivers are only allowed to drive a total of 11 hours during these 14 hours. Once the 14 hours are over, they may not drive again for another 10 hours.

Sadly, these rules are often broken by greedy drivers and trucking companies that consider downtime wasted time. When people are injured due to accidents caused by trucking companies and drivers bending the rules to make more money, they can be held liable for the injuries to victims.

Distracted Driving

Distracted driving is the number one cause of all traffic accidents, including accidents involving trucks. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) cites three types of distracted driving: visual, manual, and cognitive. These are typical examples of distracted driving:

When a driver’s distraction causes an accident, both the driver and the company that employs him can be held liable.

Improper Loading

Another type of driver error that must be investigated for most truck accidents is whether improper cargo storage played a role. Inexperienced workers may overload a truck or not know how to properly distribute the cargo’s weight, creating a dangerous condition where the truck becomes challenging to maneuver, jack-knives, or rolls over. It’s always worth investigating whether the cargo was improperly loaded by a third-party company, bringing an additional defendant into the case.

Negligent Hiring

The trucking company may also be responsible for their negligent hiring practices if they failed to do a background check. The driver had a history of reckless driving or lacked the proper experience. Even if the driver had a clean record when he was hired, the trucking company is negligent if they fail to perform routine checks on drivers they’re hired to see if they are maintaining their safety record.

Improper Maintenance or Defects

The best St. Petersburg truck accident attorney will always consider that improper maintenance of the truck or defects in how it was designed or manufactured may have played a role in causing the accident. For example, when a truck overturns it may have been due to it’s design with too high a center of gravity or improperly repaired brakes may have slowed down the ability of the truck to stop.

Municipal Liability

The government entity responsible for the road where the accident happened may share some responsibility due to a downed stop sign, a broken traffic signal, foliage that’s covered a sign, a poorly designed roadway, a pothole, or other defects/hazards. These deep pockets become extremely important for catastrophically injured victims that require more compensation that can be obtained from even large commercial insurance policies.

What Types of Compensation Are Available For Truck Accident Victims?

People that are injured by the negligence, recklessness or intentional acts of others are entitled to collect compensation from the responsible parties. There are two main types of compensation for truck accident victims – economic and non-economic. Economic damages reimburse a victim for calculable monetary losses, and non-economic damages are compensation for the subjective suffering the victim experiences. These are some examples:

Economic Damages

Hospitalization
Doctor’s Bills
Testing
Physical therapy and rehabilitation
Appliances and Prosthetics
Accommodations to Home and Vehicle
Lost Earnings
Retraining
Lost Business Income
Lost Future Earning Capacity

Non-Economic Damages

Punitive Damages are sometimes awarded to punish defendants that have engaged in intentional heinous acts. They are rarely awarded in truck accident cases, but it might be possible if a trucking company did something such as allow a driver they knew was drunk at the time to drive a route, causing an accident that resulted in catastrophic injuries.

The best way to find out what types of compensation you’re eligible for is to speak to an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney about your case.

Call D2law to schedule an appointment for a free consultation. We serve clients throughout Florida and have offices in Tampa, St. Petersburg, New Port Richey, and Brooksville.

Injuries Caused by Truck Accidents

Due to their heavyweight and heft, trucks often cause severe or catastrophic injuries to occupants of other vehicles on the road, pedestrians, and bicyclists. A life-altering catastrophic injury from a truck accident could mean years of medical treatment and rehabilitation, training for a new profession, getting used to prosthetics and accommodations to your home and vehicle.

The cost of state-of-the-art care for catastrophic injuries is astronomical, but an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney knows how to collect the large sums of money you need to promote full recovery. These are some examples of injuries caused by truck accidents:

Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs):

If you’ve injured your head in a truck accident, it’s important to seek medical treatment immediately because TBIs don’t always have pronounced symptoms immediately after an injury. TBI’s can cause severe temporary or permanent loss of function and cognition. These are the symptoms to watch out for:

Headaches
Nausea and Vomiting
Fatigue
Slurred Speech
Dizziness
Ringing in the Ears and
Light and/or Sound Sensitivity.

Spinal Cord Injuries (SCIs):

These are traumatic injuries to the spinal cord such as fractures and dislocations that can cause loss of function and sensation from the point of injury down, resulting in disabilities such as paraplegia and quadriplegia.

Medical advances such as Spinal Cord Epidural Stimulation (scES) and human stem cell therapy are showing promise. A recent study by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) that how important proper care is to improving long-term functional outcomes, so having enough money for the best care is crucial.

Amputations:

Truck accidents can cause traumatic and surgical amputations. A traumatic amputation is when the limb is severed by the accident itself and a surgical amputation is when the limb is so damaged that it must be surgically removed.

Medical advances are showing significant improvement in the ability to reattach traumatically amputated limbs and prosthetics can now enable victims to walk and run. That’s why it’s important to act quickly to collect a large amount of money you’ll need for access to the best treatment options. Our amputation injury attorneys can help.

Severe Burns:

First-degree burns often heal on their own, but the severe third and fourth-degree burns usually require skin grafts and can cause disfigurement, infections, and even life-threatening internal injuries. The recovery period for severe burns and be many years or even lifelong.

One of the most important reasons to contact an experienced St. Petersburg truck accident attorney as soon as possible after your accident is to ensure that you collect the money you’ll need for medical treatment and to compensate you for the revenue you’ve lost from your job or business.