No matter what they are carrying or where they are headed, commercial tractor-trailers in service and loaded with cargo are almost guaranteed to be the biggest and heaviest thing on any road they travel down. However, just like any machine, there are mechanical and practical limits to how much weight a semi-truck can carry before the truck becomes unsafe to drive. Unfortunately, it is far from uncommon for trucking companies to accidentally or intentionally exceed those limits.
Overloaded/overweight truck accidents in Tempe can make for uniquely complicated civil claims in more than one respect, especially if you have suffered serious injuries with life-altering repercussions. Fortunately, you have support from the dedicated truck accident lawyers at Phillips Law Group, who will take your case to trial if necessary to get you what you deserve.
Under federal law, trucks traveling on interstate highways or crossing state lines on routes can have a maximum total weight of 80,000 pounds across the cab, trailer, and cargo combined, with no more than 20,000 pounds being placed on any single axle and no more than 34,000 pounds on any one tandem axle. Arizona state law places identical restrictions on most intrastate commercial traffic, but also sometimes grants permits for overweight trucks to travel along predetermined routes within state lines.
Any truck driver or trucking company that violates these weight limits has also violated their duty of care towards other people on the road with them, which could make them legally liable for injuries caused by any subsequent wreck in Tempe involving that overloaded truck. It is also worth mentioning that trucks in compliance with legal weight limits may still be considered dangerously overweight if loaded past their manufacturer’s recommendation for safe weight limits.
Because truck collisions are often catastrophic accidents, determining exactly how much a truck weighed prior to setting off on a route can be trickier in practice than many injured people first expect. To make matters worse, many trucking companies that knowingly violate legal weight limits for their trucks are also willing to illegally alter or destroy evidence of their misconduct, such as driver logbooks and shipping manifests.
This is a big reason why having help from seasoned legal counsel can be especially important to filing suit effectively over an overweight truck crash in Tempe. Among other things, an attorney can help collect and analyze evidence that may have been tampered with to determine its veracity, as well as support a claim with other forms of evidence like witness testimony, dashboard/traffic camera footage, and data from a tractor-trailer’s onboard data recorder, or “black box.”
Even if you are confident that a trucking company’s overloading of their vehicle was the main cause of your injuries, actually proving that in court can be extremely challenging. In fact, most people who try to sue over overloaded/overweight truck accidents in Tempe without support from seasoned legal counsel wind up getting much less than the compensation they should be owed and sometimes even getting nothing at all.
Phillips Law Group has been locally owned and operated in the Phoenix metro area for more than 30 years, and we can put all of that experience to work for you in order to ensure you are fairly reimbursed for the effects of someone else’s negligence. Call today to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation with one of our team members.
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