Commercial Truck Tire Failure - Excessive Heat
Operating a commercial truck, whether it be a tractor-trailer, box truck or a dump truck, with unsafe equipment is a common cause of truck accidents. Catastrophic injuries or death frequently results when negligent behavior or faulty equipment leads to a truck crash.
The Georgia injury lawyers at Finch McCranie, LLP recently settled a tragic wrongful death case involving a dump truck that overturned and collided with our client’s car. The collision occurred as a result of a tire blowout on the dump truck. The truck tire failed for two reasons, under-inflation and speeding.
A recent study by The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) demonstrated that the top two types of damage for tire debris fragments found on the roadside were: road hazard (39%) and excessive heat (30%).
It is well known that a primary cause of tire failure is heat buildup. Head buildup in truck tires usually results from under-inflation, overloading, high speed operation or, as was the case in our client’s wrongful death case, a combination of these factors. Also, vehicles operating with low tire air pressure have reduced handling capacity and fuel economy.
Technology in the form of Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS) now exists that can monitor tire inflation and warn the driver of unsafe low tire pressure that could result in tire failure. For large trucks that may have a high-pressure air source (air compressor) on board for brakes, a better alternative to TPMS may be central tire inflation (CTI) systems that can automatically keep tire inflated to the proper pressure.
Some of the advances in reducing tire failures on large trucks have begun and this technology will no doubt continue to appear in passenger car tires as time goes on.
