Georgia Truck Accident Lawyers Blog

It was a mess that took hours of meticulous clean-up, following a Dalton trucking accident.

According to authorities, the wreck involved a semitrailer that had been hauling a number of chemical compounds, some containing formaldehyde, which flipped on I-75.

Our Atlanta truck accident attorneys understand this happened near the Tennessee border.

Formaldehyde is a strong-smelling gas that is often used as a disinfectant and to preserve dead bodies. For the living, it is known to cause disease, namely, cancer.

In the wake of the accident, small vials of cleaning solution, each containing some of the dangerous chemical, had scattered across the roadway.

According to a sergeant for the Georgia State Highway Patrol, the truck had been hauling two trailers when it struck a guardrail and the rear trailer flipped. In a domino effect, two more accidents happened soon after, according to press reports. One woman even had to be sent to the hospital.

It occurred early in the morning, about 5 a.m. It was on I-75, about a half hour outside of Chattanooga.

The chemical bottles across the roadway forced the sheriff's office to close two of the interstate's southbound lanes.

Unfortunately, that was the second trucking accident in Georgia in as many days.

Other area news reports indicate that an accident that happened just a day before the chemical spill resulted in the death of a trucker in northwest Georgia.

The Associated Press reports that the driver, who was from Indiana, was operating a Freightliner truck. He was going south in Gordon County, near the 320 exit on I-75, when the truck drifted off the road. Investigators still aren't sure exactly what caused the truck to leave the road, but they determined the driver over-corrected, got back on the road and then flipped.

A spokesman for the state highway patrol said the driver wasn't wearing a seat belt, and was ejected due to the impact. He died a short time later.

No one else was hurt in the accident.

While we are saddened to hear of the passing of the Indiana trucker on our state highway, we were relieved to hear no one else had been hurt. Statistics indicate that often in crashes involving a large truck, other people are likely to be injured.

In fact, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, of those people who were killed in accidents involving large trucks in 2008, almost 75 percent - or three-quarters - were occupants of the other vehicle. Another 10 percent of those killed were non-occupants, meaning they were not in another car and they weren't in the truck either. In 16 percent of the cases, it was someone inside the large truck who died.

Injury statistics indicate the same trend. In the cases where serious injury occurred in crashes with large trucks, 71 percent were the people in the other vehicle. Three percent were non-occupants, and 26 were the people inside the large truck.