A semi truck driver was killed on September 2nd in an accident on an Indiana toll road in the early morning. Indiana State Troopers who investigated the scene reported that the driver was heading eastbound around 4:15 a.m. on Friday when the driver’s vehicle overturned near highway mile marker 85, very close to the toll road’s Mishakawa exit. Rescue crews reported having to pull the man out of the cab.
Only one highway lane had to be closed while crews worked to clear the accident, which was finished by midmorning. According to authorities, the cause of death is still unknown. The driver’s name has not been released, but it has been confirmed by state police that he was from Ohio.
That is literally all the information that was released to news outlets following this accident on Friday. The police haven’t released any further details as of this writing. What was the driver’s name? Was the driver drunk at the time of the crash?
Semi truck crashes have become so common that reporting on them, even when they involve a death, has become a routine matter. No one is surprised when a massive truck jackknifes, or when a driver apparently manages, apropos of nothing, to flip his own vehicle in the early hours of the morning.The fact that only one person was killed in this accident seems to make it appear very minor compared to the multiple-car pileups and hours-long, entire-highway-closed delays that result from other, more spectacular accidents.
The concern of this blog is that it will lead to an attitude that such accidents are somehow no big deal, rather than the severe and potentially catastrophic incidents that they usually are. A semi truck is a vehicle that outweighs almost every other vehicle on the road except another semi, and often carries loads that outweigh the towing vehicle itself. Such an accident shouldn’t ever be written off as routine, if only for the sake of the victims of such collisions.
