The 20 most harmful counties for deadly accidents with massive vans

On March 14, a truck accident occurred in Pittsford, NY, luckily the truck driver and three adults and an toddler within the automobile suffered solely minor accidents. (AP)

We regularly obtain emails from private harm regulation companies which have mined Nationwide Freeway Visitors Security Administration crash information for insights. Their motive might be to extend enterprise, however there's additionally a PSA facet to it, and these pitches can uncover some fascinating info. In at the moment's information dump from a Boston regulation agency, we discovered that there's one place within the oil fields of West Texas the place greater than half of all deadly car crashes contain an enormous truck.

Reeves County, Texas, is true within the center. The county's largest metropolis is Pecos, inhabitants 13,000, positioned within the coronary heart of the Permian Basin oil discipline. Reeves County can be the place I-10 and I-20 meet, that means it’s an nexus for cross-country semi-truck journey. And industrial truck site visitors related to the oil and fuel business is kind of massive. Pecos plans to construct a bypass street across the metropolis to divert this and hopefully cut back industrial truck accidents. In the meantime, 56% of deadly crashes there contain a big truck.

In whole numbers, there will not be many deadly accidents in Reeves County, or anyplace else on this checklist – though all of the deaths are very excessive. However the figures in share phrases are surprising. Even the Georgia county ranked final on this prime 20 checklist has seen greater than 1 / 4 of all truck deaths.

Going straight to NHTSA turns up a whole lot of information, and places a few of it into perspective: Nationally, 9.3% of deadly crashes contain a big truck, so clearly the counties on this checklist are critical outliers.

NHTSA defines a big truck as having a gross car weight ranking of greater than 10,000 kilos – a definition that would come with not solely semi vans or different industrial vans, but in addition some heavy-duty pickups. (71% of accidents involving vans of any dimension had been these massive vans.)

In 2021, the final yr for which information is offered, 5,788 individuals died in site visitors accidents involving massive vans. That is 17% greater than in 2020. Of those that misplaced their lives, 72% had been in different automobiles, a not shocking however sobering reality of physics when heavy objects and light-weight objects share the street.

And these law-firm estimates usually don’t point out the quantity of people that weren’t killed. NHTSA says an estimated 154,993 individuals had been injured in massive truck crashes.

The counties on this checklist are pretty rural: Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma. You may think about that lengthy stretches of desolate freeway, velocity and grueling schedules apply there. Nevertheless, the NHTSA report doesn’t assign fault in these crashes.

All of this can be a reminder to be additional cautious when out with massive rigs.

Right here's a nationwide map from NHTSA that gives an even bigger image, adopted by a listing of the 20 worst counties by share of regulation companies:

Massive vans as share of automobiles in deadly crashes, 2021

Essentially the most harmful counties for deadly crashes involving massive vans