Truck Accident Reconstruction – Here’s Everything You Need To Know
Determining the actual cause of a truck accident is important for insurance companies (for claim related purposes), accident victims (to prove that their claim is valid indeed), and drivers who are suspected to be guilty of the incident (to prove his/her innocence).
But how does this process work?
In here, we have tried to discuss all these things in greater detail for your reference. So let’s begin.
Who are the people involved in a truck accident reconstruction process?
Most truck accidents are primarily investigated by two categories of people, and these are:
- The police
- Private truck accident investigators
The police usually involve themselves to find out whether any criminal activity had occurred at the time of the crash or not (such as the involvement of drugs or other controlled substances etc.)
On the other hand, private accident investigators don’t try to look for the involvement of criminal activities in the accident. Instead, their job is to analyze carefully, determine the EXACT cause of the crash, and report.
The Investigation Process – Steps
The truck accident investigation process usually involves 4 steps. These are:
- Collecting evidence
- A thorough inspection of the scene
- Investigation of the vehicle(s) involved in the accident
- Accident reconstruction
1. Collection of evidence
The primary investigation objective is to do an impeccable reconstruction of the accident that can be presented in court for any accident-related claims. But for all that, they require substantial evidence to back themselves up.
Hence, the first step of the traffic accident investigation process involves the collection of on-site evidence from site investigations (which is going to come next).
2. Site inspection
The investigators would do their best to collect the following information from the site of the accident:
- The ACTUAL collision location.
- The PRECISE collision time.
- The first person to notice the accident and inform the police of the same.
- Weather visibility at the time of the accident.
- Other collision-related information (Why did the collision happen? Was it a boulder? Or a tree? Did it happen on intention? Etc.)
The truck accident investigators would also strive to collect other important accident-related information from skid marks, debris, gouge marks, etc. These will soon follow by things like:
- Capturing 360-degree photographs of the accident scene.
- Photograph the entire accident scene to determine its exact location and scale on the map.
- Close-up photographs.
3. Inspection of the truck and the other vehicles involved in the accident
So the investigation of the actual scene’s done and dusted. The investigators should then turn their attention to the vehicles; the ones who were actually involved in the accident.
The inspection is carried out with 2 purposes. These are:
- Determining the fact whether the vehicle was really safe at the time of the drive.
- Checking the fact whether the statements of the witnesses support the damage done to the vehicles or not.
Vehicle inspection can aid in revealing a number of important pieces of information to the investigators which are inclusive of things like:
- The actual speed of the vehicle seconds before the collision.
- The intensity of the brakes.
- The exact time and location of the impact, and others.
4. Accident reconstruction
Now, it’s time we move forward to the real thing – the reconstruction.
The ultimate step deals with the entire accident reconstruction through means of 3D animated videos, evidential data, and science.
Here’s an example (that’s not directly related to truck accidents, in general):
Embed video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFuHH9mh2b0
Truck accident reconstruction is usually done in five steps:
- Processing the collected data
- Evaluation of hypotheses
- Creating 3D models
- Recreating the accident through the aid of virtual simulation (just like the video depicted above).
The Wikipedia article can throw more light on this matter if you are interested enough.
The reconstruction video can be produced in court to significantly affect the outcomes of a truck accident verdict. So this process is not something that can be ignored for sure.
So that’s it then. It’s time we bring this to an end for now. Hope you had an enlightening read.