Mary and AnnaLeah Karth in January 2013.
Truck underride crashes are among the most horrific collisions on the road.
The gruesome tragedies typically involve a car sliding under the back or side of a tractor-trailer. They have taken the lives of victims ranging from the actress Jayne Mansfield in 1967 to a pair of North Carolina teenagers on their way to their siblings’ college graduation ceremonies in 2013. Those killed often suffer severe head trauma – or even are scalped or decapitated — when a truck’s frame penetrates an auto’s passenger compartment.
For decades, the federal government has required rear impact guards on many larger trucks. Yet federal estimates of the death toll from truck underride crashes have held steady at about 200 a year, and critics say the real figure actually is higher.
Safety advocates were encouraged two years ago when federal authorities — prodded by petitions from consumer groups and the mother of the North Carolina teens – announced that they would look into strengthening regulations for protective steel bars on the backs of trucks. But the activists were dismayed when the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration disclosed its proposal last December.
While a American Trucking Associations spokesman expressed optimism that NHTSA’s proposed rule “will be a step forward for highway safety,” the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which has conducted crash tests and other research on the issue, said the plan “misses an opportunity to substantially improve” underride protection.
Scene of the May 2013 crash that took the lives of teenagers Mary and AnnaLeah Karth.
NHTSA’s proposal would require that rear impact guards be strong enough not to collapse, yet able to absorb enough energy, to protect motorists who squarely strike the back of a truck at up to 35 miles per hour. That’s an increase of only 5 mph from the current U.S. standard, and what Canada has had since 2007.
Given that more than 90 percent of new semi-trailers sold in the U.S. already comply with the Canadian standard, NHTSA has said its proposal would likely save only one life and prevent only three serious injuries a year, while adding $229 to the cost of each new truck. NHTSA officials did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“Sadly, their proposal is to replace a 20-year-old standard with a 10-year-old standard. What they’re doing is essentially just copying the Canadian standard,” said John Lannen, executive director of the Virginia-based Truck Safety Coalition. He said there are other technical options NHTSA could have proposed that “are vastly superior to the standards that they put out.”
Greensboro News & Record
For starters, Insurance Institute researchers say, the federal proposal should require that impact guards – typically, two vertical steel bars extending down from the truck frame to support a horizontal bar slightly less than two feet from the ground — be strengthened near their corners. That’s because vehicles that strike close to the edge of a truck, in what engineers refer to as offset crashes, are more likely to suffer fatal passenger compartment intrusions.
Some trucking companies already are voluntarily adding that extra protection even as industry associations are supporting the NHTSA proposal. Four of the eight largest U.S. truck trailer manufacturers — Manac, Wabash, Vanguard and Stoughton – in recent months have proven to offer adequate protection in offset crash tests, according to a senior research engineer with the Insurance Institute, Matthew Brumbelow.
Tests Show a Remedy for Gruesome Underride Crashes
Wabash National Corp. President Dick Giromini says his company’s new guards add $350 to the price of a trailer, but that buyers have included J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc., which ordered 4,000 trailers with its RIG-16 system. “Safety is our number one value and priority,” Giromini said in an e-mail.
The Insurance Institute also wants NHTSA to require underride guards on some types of single-unit trucks (those that don’t pull a trailer, such as dump trucks and delivery trucks) that aren’t currently required to have them. In addition, the organization favors side guards installed to help prevent bicycles and pedestrians from sliding under garbage trucks, tractor-trailers and other behemoths as they make blind turns.
A guard designed to reduce deadly underride crashes made by truck trailer manufacturer Wabash National.
“It is something a lot of cities are looking at,” Brumbelow said. He noted that New York and Boston have adopted ordinances in the past two years requiring new side guard protections on municipal truck fleets.
The NHTSA approach is fueled, safety advocates say, by the Reagan era requirement that economic benefits outweigh the costs of safety rules.
“The craziness of government is that you have to put lives on one side of the scale, and on the other side, dollars,” said vehicle safety advocate Louis V. Lombardo, a former NHTSA staffer.
What’s more, safety advocates say federal officials, because of poor data, probably undercount the portion of the nation’s nearly 4,000 truck-related deaths annually that are due to underride collisions.
Most jurisdictions, for example, lack a check-off box for underride on police reports. As a result, Brumbelow complained, NHTSA researchers have called people connected with a crash two years later and relied on their fuzzy memories to determine whether a fatality was underride-related.
In one IIHS truck crash study that Brumbelow cited, researchers found photographic evidence of underride in 23 collisions. Yet only eight had been coded as underride crashes by NHTSA. By undercounting deaths, Brumbelow says, they underestimate the benefits.
An underride crash in Georgia in May 2013 took the lives of North Carolina sisters AnnaLeah Karth, 17, and Mary Karth, 13. Marianne Karth, a mother of nine, was heading to Texas with AnnaLeah, Mary and one of their brothers to attend the college graduations of four of their older siblings when her blue Crown Victoria was struck from behind by a tractor-trailer.
Actress Jayne Mansfield, who was killed in an underride crash in 1967 after performing at a Mississippi nightclub. (Getty Images)
The impact, the police report said, spun her car around, and it was struck again by the same truck and pushed, rear-end first, toward another. The guard bar on the back of the second trailer-truck failed to prevent her sedan from sliding under, and the two teens in the back seat were killed.
Karth, who lives in Rocky Mount, N.C., has since devoted herself to underride safety. She and her husband, Jerry, have met repeatedly with safety organizations and federal highway officials. They also have launched petition drives and posted emotional videos packed with photos of daughters AnnaLeah and Mary, together with their stuffed animals.
“The grief is the fuel which lights the fire under me to fight this battle,” Marianne Karth said. Karth expressed frustration over “knowing that this is a decades-old problem, that it could have been addressed more adequately a long time ago.”
She calls NHTSA’s proposed rule “not really much of an improvement,” faulting it for, among other things, failing to require sideguards or protection against front override collisions. Karth is urging safety advocates and industry groups to negotiate a consensus on reforms that can be presented to NHTSA for action. To that end, the Karths and the Insurance Institute co-hosted a forum last month that drew nearly 100 representatives of truck-trailer manufacturers, government agencies, safety research and victims’ groups.
It’s uncertain when, or even if, NHTSA will issue a final rule. And the agency is only in a preliminary stage of considering enhanced underride protection for single-unit trucks.
The American Trucking Associations, a leading industry trade group, says it is satisfied with the Canadian-style rear guard upgrade NHTSA has proposed.
Ted Scott, the ATA’s director of engineering, questioned the idea of strengthening guards to prevent injuries at speeds exceeding 35 mph. “If you make the trailer capable of stopping anything,” he said, “now you’re running into a brick wall so you’re going to die anyway.”
In mid-May, the Truck Trailers Manufacturers Association sent NHTSA a letter that argued against broader safety reforms. The letter said the association agreed with past federal assessments that sideguards would not make economic sense, and it further asserted that the guards had “many unresolved technological challenges.”
Brumbelow said he thinks NHTSA officials are likely to adopt a final rule that “essentially adopts the Canadian standard” for rear impact guards “because there’s no pushback” from the industry against doing that.
This article needs a little more research. To be fair to NHTSA, The Truck Safety Coalition presented to NHTSA at their meeting to present the petitions to the U.S. DOT the option to adopt the Canadian Regulation. It was after opposition from the Underride Network that the Truck Safety Coalition finally admitted that slightly higher-speed underride guards might be needed. We were attacked for this opposition to their proposal and after the TSC formed their own Underride Group I disbanded the Underride Network.
We have seen Truck Safety degenerate in the U.S. to trucking union workplace safety issues such as truck driver fatigue, working hours, driver pay, and truck size and weight to force hiring fewer drivers. In several speeches to Congress about current issues in trucking safety, neither the TSC or Advocates even mentioned underride, underride guards, truck parking, or underride victims. There is no thought to the thousands of victims worldwide that suffer death and injury because weak laws here lead to weak laws in Europe and soon propagate worldwide. We talk about tens of deaths versus thousands and to compound the crimes members of Congress do not drive cars and so ignore car based safety issues. They fly, so Airline victims have regular attention, and some now ride bikes so side guards appear with car safety mention or effectiveness removed.
We had NHTSA safety research cars in the 1970’s with square energy absorbing foam bumpers a foot thick, front, side, and rear. They bragged it would be virtually impossible to die in highway crashes. These cars disappeared after industry opposition much as the much publicized electric cars. We spend thousands for car bumpers which have engineered energy absorption even though mildly at best effective, and then give awards and praise to stiff underride guards that cost only hundreds. Guards that do not meet production guard technology available since 1970 and before.
According to tests at IIHS, obstacle detection technology in cars is already quite capable. This should be effective in preventing most crashes to 35 mph as it is widely adopted in a couple of years. We are regulating and praising guards that are effective for low-speed crash speeds that will be rare and due to improving crash survival technology in cars non-fatal. We are helping to form a new regulation that after two years time to implementation 99% of trucks on the road will already meet. This means we are legalizing low-speed killer guards with no improvements to safety and the removal of poorly designed guards as an issue in wrongful death suits. We are simply legalizing guards already on the roads!
A leading killer in rear underride crashes is illegally and unsafely parked trucks. Prior to the formation of the FMCSA the U.S. government used to publish safety messages reminding drivers of the dangers of roadside parking. These safety campaigns are cheap and could save 50% of the lives lost in rear underride crashes. They could recommend only parking on low-speed roadways and always placing safety triangles. They could demand state and local police start enforcing safe parking laws. We could save another percentage of victims in safety education on slow-moving trucks using flashers to warn motorists on hills and in traffic. We could pass laws making it illegal to non-emergency park trucks and trailers on federal highways and require by law use of flashers for slow-moving trucks.
Under MASH we crash test crash attenuators at real world crash speeds of 62 mph. It is no surprise that crash attenuators are effective from 62 mph up to 70 mph and above. They engineer the equipment to meet the crash tests and no more. We are giving success to guard designers as they are passing our low-speed tests and they can use this success as a sales tool and have no incentive financially to improve guard effectiveness speeds. They are not required to engineer effective energy absorption for trucks as the absorption engineered into modern cars meets their needs at low-speeds. We do not test for differences in car size, weight, and design.
The sad truth is this problem is easy to fix. Americans are not afraid of low-speed city roadway crashes, we are terrified on the freeway sandwiched in the front, sides, and rear by big trucks. We can solve a majority of rear fatalities with cheap safety training and simple laws. We can crash test at real world speeds and guard designers will engineer guards that pass the higher-speed tests using technology available since 1970. We can pass regulations that require more energy absorption from the truck and not place all of the burden of solving underride crashes to car crash safety engineering. We can tell the whole truth about truck crashes and truck safety for a change.
Excellent article! The media should communicate this widely as an important public service from Fair Warning..
The Karth family, IIHS, and the Truck Safety Coalition have done superb work.
The Trucking Association continues to spout disinformation: “Ted Scott, the ATA’s director of engineering, questioned the idea of strengthening guards to prevent injuries at speeds exceeding 35 mph. “If you make the trailer capable of stopping anything,” he said, “now you’re running into a brick wall so you’re going to die anyway.””
That was a concern that had some validity in the 1970’s before airbags and seat belts. Back then at NHTSA we were investigating use of Energy Absorbing guards such as the Quinton Hazell Underride Guard. Then in 1980, Reagan became President and safety work was abruptly stopped, NHTSA staff was reduced by 33% down to 600 people – a depressed level it remains at to this day. Ever since NHTSA has become an increasingly captive agency. See http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/29/opinion/weak-oversight-deadly-cars.html?_r=0
With nearly 100 deaths, plus 400 serious injuries, estimated to cost nearly $2 Billion each average day in the U.S.A. today resulting from vehicle violence, the American people need to be informed and activated to demand safety from the clear and present dangers of all crashes. See
http://www.careforcrashvictims.com/assets/MonthlyReportforJanuary2016-Corrected.pdf