Truck accidents can bring a thriving trucking career to a screeching halt or, worse yet, cause wrongful deaths.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), motor vehicle crashes claimed 40,990 lives in 2023. A significant percentage of these fatalities was due to collisions with commercial trucks.
While death is the worst possible outcome of truck accidents, many surviving victims often grapple with excruciating physical pain and emotional trauma.
Fortunately, you can seek immediate medical attention to mitigate the impact of truck collisions.
Prompt medical treatments can help accurately diagnose the injuries sustained from truck accidents. It also helps link those injuries to the incident in question, improving your chances of fair compensation.
This post highlights the most common injuries from truck accidents.
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Unpacking the Significance of Legal Intervention After Truck Accidents
Despite adopting advanced safety measures in the trucking industry, such as predictive maintenance technology, truck collisions are still worryingly high.
The consequences of truck accidents are often too grim to contemplate. From tendon tears to bone fractures and emotional trauma, there’s simply no predicting the medical aftermath of truck crashes.
But while truck accidents aren’t entirely avoidable, you can mitigate their impact by seeking legal help.
Contacting a Las Vegas truck accident attorney ensures a trusted professional handles the legal aspects of the case while you seek the necessary medical attention. The attorney will collect vital evidence before the crash scene is contaminated. Those include taking pictures of skid marks, recording witness statements, and securing the black boxes of all involved vehicles.
A truck accident attorney will also handle all communication with your insurance company and help with the claim process. Meanwhile, you can focus fully on your recovery.
Causes and Types of Truck Accidents
Truck accidents can result from distracted driving, drunk driving, speeding, and inclement weather. Other causes are vehicle-related, such as overloading and poor maintenance.
One of the most common types of truck accidents is rollovers, in which a vehicle tips over.
Rollovers mostly affect trucks with high centers of gravity (CoG). They typically occur during sharp turns and sudden weight shifts or while driving along bumpy terrains.
Other types of truck accidents include;
- Jackknife accidents, where a truck’s trailer swings out of alignment with the cab
- Blind spot accidents, where a truck hits traffic or pedestrians in its ‘no zone’
- Rear-end collision, where a truck rams into the vehicles in front
- Wide turn accidents, in which a truck collides with traffic in adjacent lanes while making a wide turn
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Types of Injuries from Truck Accidents
1. Whiplash and Neck Injuries
Considered one of the most common truck accident injuries, whiplash and neck injuries occur when a driver’s head jerks back and forth uncontrollably.
These injuries typically result from rear-end collisions and can be compounded by sudden braking. Without prompt treatment, they may cause chronic pain in the cervical spine.
2. Spinal Cord Injuries
Spinal cord injuries result from significant damage to the vertebrae. They may cause temporary paralysis or permanent disability, depending on the severity of the crash.
Spinal cord injuries can be dreadful for truckers, as truck driving requires full-body coordination. Worse yet, therapies may last for months before the victim can return to work.
3. Bone Fractures
Trucks are beasts of the freeways. So, it’s unsurprising that a truck collision can significantly damage or fracture your bones.
The lower body is typically the most affected, with many victims sustaining broken legs and ribs.
Like spinal injuries, fractured bones can take months to treat. Swift medical attention is the surest way to accelerate your recovery.
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4. Cuts and Lacerations
Many truck accidents can end in shattered windshields and send shrapnel flying dangerously in your direction, causing cuts and lacerations.
While they’re easy to ignore, cuts and lacerations can cause significant blood loss and open up your skin to severe infections like tetanus. It’s worse if the accident occurs off-road, as earth debris may compound the damage caused by glass shrapnel.
Therefore, prompt treatment is necessary. Most clinics will dress the wound and possibly administer antibiotics or tetanus injections.
5. Internal Injuries
You may be involved in a grisly truck collision but emerge without visible injuries, only to wind up dead the following day. Although concealed from the naked eye, internal injuries can cause life-threatening damage to vital organs – brain, heart, liver, and kidneys.
One of the worst forms of internal injury is traumatic brain injury (TBI). TBIs result from blunt force trauma to the head, causing the brain to jolt within the skull.
While symptoms may not occur immediately, dizziness, headache, and memory loss will soon set in. Without timely intervention, long-term cognitive decline is almost assured.
6. Emotional Trauma
Some truck accident victims may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), while others might experience full-blown depression.
Professional counseling is essential to help manage these conditions and restore the patient to full emotional functionality.
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Final Word
Truck accidents can occur without warning. Regardless of the cause, the injuries are often devastating.
Seeking immediate medical attention can help diagnose your injuries early enough and have them treated before they degenerate into life-threatening complications. Besides, it proves that the injuries resulted directly from the stated cause.
As well as seeking prompt treatment, remember to contact your lawyer immediately after being involved in a car accident. The attorney’s intervention will be invaluable in helping collect vital evidence and prepare the necessary documentation for filing personal injury claims.
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