Work as a personal injury attorney long enough and one can see where fate plays as much of a part in the outcome of serious traffic accidents as most any other factor. Fate, luck, divine intervention; call it what you will, but not every roadway collision follows the same “game plan.” Many times, the result of a serious injury accident versus a fatal car or commercial trucking wreck can be as simple as what the driver had to eat that morning. We’re being a bit facetious here, but often one finds similar types of accidents lead to vastly different outcomes.
As Maryland personal injury attorneys, I and my staff of legal professionals are focused on helping the victims of car, truck and pedestrian accidents. Although the various kinds of car and truck crashes can be classified in a number of different categories, the reasons why certain people survive and why others perish are much more varied and mostly unknowable prior to the actual incident. The automobile, life and commercial insurance industries remain viable for just this reason; that is, property damage and personal injury accidents are fairly random and can rarely, if ever, be predicted.
Of course, when it comes to traffic accidents, it would be possible to mostly avoid being involved in one given the requirement that a person would likely never travel on a public road. While this is an extreme example, and likely nobody would willingly and totally divorce themselves from vehicular travel, there are still other areas of everyday life that allow for multiple opportunities for bodily injury.
Some safety experts argue that better driver training is necessary to help curb the number and frequency of automobile traffic injuries and deaths along the nation’s highways and surface streets. That said, we can relate our experience in car and trucking-related accident law by adding that there are no absolutes. In other words, it is unlikely in a modern society like ours that one could hope to attain a zero-percent traffic accident record here in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., or anywhere else across the United States. Eventually, a negligent driver will cause a crash involving himself and maybe others.
Then it comes to how lucky an individual is when he or she is caught up in a roadway collision no of their own making. Some people can be killed in the most innocuous car accidents, while others may walk away totally unharmed from the most violent and deadly car or motorcycle crashes. Take, for instance, an accident that took place along a stretch of Interstate 68 a few months back when a wrong-way driver apparently caused an injury accident.
According to news reports, the accident occurred on a Saturday morning causing an elderly man to be hurt and two others to be injured when his pickup truck hit another passenger vehicle carrying a 51-year-old man and his teenage son. Police estimated that the crash happened a little after 11:30am as 81-year-old James Stokes’ Ford F-150 was traveling in the opposite direction of traffic in the eastbound lanes of I-68. Police determined that Stokes was at fault and they charged him with negligent driving.
Although all three people involved in the crash survived with non- life-threatening injuries, they were all transported to Western Maryland Regional Medical Center for treatment and evaluation by medical personnel. Because of the crash, police ended up closing the entire eastbound side of the expressway for about an hour to investigate and clean up the accident scene.
Three people hurt in wrong-way I-68 crash, Times-News.com, May 5, 2012