Claremore, OK — A tanker truck accidentally rear-ended a slow-moving U-Haul truck along the I-44 Will Rogers Turnpike this past Tuesday, July 7, 2015. The U-Haul driver, an unnamed woman, was taken to a hospital for injuries not believed to be life-threatening.
The driver of the tanker truck wasn’t harmed. No names have been released so far, but the OHP did a very thorough job of describing what happened and getting statements from both truck drivers.
According to their reports, this happened around mile marker 258 on Tuesday afternoon, where the highway crests. The tanker truck driver told OHP troopers that he was headed along the turnpike when he came over a small hill and saw a U-Haul truck in front of him, moving slowly.
Allegedly, the trucker had the cruise control switched on and wasn’t able to turn it off and apply his brakes before hitting the back of the U-Haul truck. The woman driving the U-Haul wasn’t critically injured, but was taken to a hospital for treatment. She told the OHP that she saw the tanker truck “coming up fast” that afternoon.
The tanker truck driver wasn’t harmed.
So far, this may need some more investigation and there may even be charges filed.
Map of the Accident
Commentary:
What really sticks out to me here is the details provided by the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. They’ve quoted both the victim and the tanker truck driver in their reports, particularly the truck driver admitting that he didn’t notice the U-Haul truck was going slow and that he didn’t take cruise control off.
Folks, I’m glad this accident wasn’t more serious and that nobody was badly hurt, but that’s no reason not to treat this seriously. At the end of the day, a truck driver may have made a pretty big error in judgement and done a lot of damage as a result. Whoever he was working for at the time needs to be made aware of this accident and they need to take responsibility for their driver. Has he ever been in any wrecks before? There are a few questions I still have after reading the news reports and that’s definitely one of them.
The other big question that I can’t believe nobody else has asked concerns the cruise control on the tanker truck. In the reports I read, it sounded as if the truck driver was saying that he couldn’t turn the cruise control, which caused him to rear-end the U-Haul. I haven’t driven as many miles behind the wheel of a semi-truck as this driver, but even I think that sounds a little strange. A cruise control that needs to be turned off? How about just tapping your brakes? It seems hard to imagine that someone would design a “locking” cruise control device that takes multiple steps to turn off, that just seems like an accident waiting to happen.
— Grossman Law Offices
