Dozens of traffic-related personal injury accidents take place every month across this state and it doesn’t make much difference whether you live in an urban area like Baltimore, Rockville and The District, or in a less populated portion of Maryland. A bad car, truck or motorcycle crash will likely put one or more people in the hospital. Occasionally, fate plays the unenviable part in a roadway collision, resulting in an untimely death for a driver or passenger of a motor vehicle.
As automobile accident attorneys, I and my staff of experienced legal professionals understand all too well the extent of bodily injuries that can occur as a result of a really bad accident. From compound fractures, collapsed lungs, ruptured spleen or even closed-head trauma, the range of life-threatening conditions that can precipitate from a car or commercial trucking accident are many and varied. What we do know is that recovery, in many cases, will long and drawn out; some people may never fully recover, requiring daily or near-constant care for months or even years.
Car-to-car wrecks can be quite serious, to be sure, especially in the case of head-on accidents or high-speed T-bone crashes at highway intersections and access roads. Speed and size of the vehicles involved play a large role in the potential outcome of most any traffic wreck.
Of course, those involving large commercial vehicles, such as box trucks, heavily-laden contractor vans, dump trucks, all the way up to full-loaded 18-wheelers offer increasingly worse outcomes for the victims of a trucking crash. An accident that occurred a while back was a reminder of the devastating results that a commercial vehicle crash can render on a much smaller passenger car.
Based on news reports, a local woman was killed in a Worchester, MD, crash when she apparently misjudged the speed of an approaching tractor-trailer rig. According to police reports, the accident took place along a stretch of Rte 113 in Pocomoke City when an SUV driven by a resident of Snow Hill, MD, turned in front of an oncoming semi. News articles indicate that 46-year-old Debra Dean was traveling along Rte 113 at about 4pm in the afternoon on a Friday afternoon in the Pocomoke area.
The crash happened when the woman attempted to cross the southbound lanes of Rte 113 from the eastbound portion of Rte 756. Police reports covering the crash stated that the woman’s sport utility vehicle did not yield to oncoming traffic; in doing so the vehicle turned directly into the path of a southbound big rig. The tractor-trailer collided with the victim’s Ford Explorer, hitting the driver’s side of car. The force of the collisions caused the Ford to overturn.
Emergency response teams rushed the woman to the Peninsula Regional Medical Center, but by the time they arrived doctors could not help the victims, who was pronounced dead at the hospital.
There was no mention of any other people who may have been injured in the crash, and it’s safe to say that the trucker was likely not hurt too badly, if at all. At the time of the news article, the accident investigation was being conducted through the mutual assistance of the Maryland State Police Commercial Vehicle Enforcement Division, as well as the Maryland State Highway Administration (SHA) and Worcester County Sheriff’s office.
Snow Hill Woman Killed in Rt 113 Crash, WBOC.com, April 27, 2012