Garbage Truck Accidents

Apparently trucking accidents can occur anywhere, even when you’re family is supposedly safe at home. That’s what happened not long ago when the driver of a trash collection truck apparently lost control and slammed into the front of a South Baltimore home. As a Maryland personal injury lawyer, I have helped many people following the aftermath of semi collisions and tractor-trailer crashes on our highways and surface streets.

Although most truck-related crashes involve other vehicles, this particular accident caused massive damage to a family’s home. It is only by shear luck that no one was seriously injured in the incident. Accidents involving large commercial vehicles can range from minor abrasions, to deep cuts and bruises, contusions, neck and spinal damage, or traumatic brain injuries.

According to reports, the family who house was damaged did receive help from the city, who owns and operates the garbage truck that hit the structure. The city’s housing commissioner was told by the mayor to do “everything possible to help this family.”

The Baltimore Sun reports that Christine D. Schoppert, 33, of Pasadena, Maryland was killed driving her five year old daughter to nursery school on Tuesday morning. Schoppert stopped her Nissan Maxima to make the left turn into the Creative Garden Learning Center on Ordnance Road when Brian Weatherley’s Chrysler Concord rear ended her. The collision forced Schoppert into the path of an oncoming garbage truck and both vehicles caught fire.

A passerby on his way to work, Coast Guard Petty Officer First Class, Lavelas Luckey, spotted the smoking Maxima and quickly rescued the child from the car. The child was transported to Johns Hopkins Hospital where she is being treated for life threatening injuries.

Although the police are still investigating the circumstances surrounding the accident, this story reminds of something that I was taught in my driver’s education course. The instructors taught us that when stopped waiting to make a turn off of a roadway, a driver should keep a vehicle’s wheels pointed forward until they begin to make the turn. If a car has its wheels turned in one direction or another and is struck from behind, the impact will force the car in the direction the front wheels are pointed.

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