Personal Injury Law

MODOT Says Guard Cables Will Be Installed in May in Area With Truck Fatality

By Jeffrey Lowe

As a St. Louis semi truck accident lawyer, I know that crossover accidents are one of the most common causes of deadly head-on crashes between passenger cars and tractor-trailers. So I was extremely pleased to see a March 22 article from the Lee?s Summit Journal saying guard cables will go in on a nearby stretch of highway that had a series of fatal accidents. The Missouri Department of Transportation will add cables to the median of U.S. Highway 50 between Interstate 470 and Third Street in Lee?s Summit. Work is expected to start May 1 and end before June, an engineer for MODOT said. The engineer added that they are extremely effective at keeping vehicles from crossing into oncoming traffic, but cost substantially less than concrete barriers.

MODOT promised the guard cables last November after two fatalities on the affected stretch of highway. They include a semi truck crash that took the life of Mark Prigge, 23, of Blue Springs. Prigge was driving west near Third Street when he crossed the median and into the path of an eastbound tractor-trailer, which hit his Jeep. The accident pushed the trailer part of the truck into the westbound lanes, endangering drivers on both sides of the highway. Fewer than two weeks later, Cozzette Latimer of Kansas City, 49, was killed when a white van crossed the median and hit her vehicle. This was an unusually high number of fatalities for Lee?s Summit, which a police officer said last saw a traffic fatality in 2008.

Losing two people in such close succession may have driven the request for guard cables from the community around Lee?s Summit. But as a Missouri big rig accident attorney, I?m glad that MODOT is responding by putting in guard cables, even if the two accidents were a sad anomaly. Crossover accidents are typically head-on accidents, and statistics as well as common sense show that head-on accidents are deadly. As I recently wrote here about a similar demand in Kansas, guard cables stop cars from crossing into traffic and endangering their own occupants? lives as well as the lives of people on the other side. That?s especially important in 18-wheeler crashes because the much larger size of a large commercial truck virtually guarantees that a crash will destroy the smaller car ? regardless of who crossed the line.

Full post as published by Trucking Accident Attorney Blog on March 25, 2011 (boomark / email).