Highway Work Zone Accidents & Safety

Highway Work Zone Accidents & Safety by Texas Highway Work Zone Accident Attorney Justin A. Hill

Highway Work Zone Accidents have become common occurrences and widely reported.  In Texas, where highways seem to be in a constant state of construction, driving through work zones can sometimes be a very harrowing experience.

According to a recent extensive article by the New York Times, “[t]here are virtually no laws or regulations mandating safety measures in work zones. There are standards, but they are loosely enforced and differ from state to state. As a result, there are few penalties levied against contractors when, because of ignorance, carelessness or a desire to save money, guidelines are violated. Problem contractors often just keep on getting hired, and dangerous practices remain uncorrected, sometimes for years.”

One, of many, of the problems associated with highway work zone accidents are the creation and introduction of pavement edge drop offs on the edge of heavily traveled roadways.  According to the same article:

Accidents involving dangerous drop-offs kill about 160 people and injure 11,000 each year. Numerous studies have shown that the steeper the drop-off, the greater the danger. In Texas in 2002, seven people were killed when a car slipped off a sharp edge of roadway and onto the shoulder, causing the driver to overcorrect into the path of a minivan. Four years before, six people died in a succession of accidents in another Texas work zone, where contractors had failed to smooth out the edge of a newly paved lane.  Yet when the contractors repaving Highway 51 west of Fort Worth discovered that they lacked sufficient equipment, they decided to pave only part of the roadway and finish the rest days later, leaving a sharp drop-off that ran for miles within the travel lane. A state inspector warned that it was dangerous, but no one — not his superiors, not the contractor — listened.  Two days after that warning, Mr. Lee, a 26-year-old oil field worker with a wife and two young sons, rounded a curve in the early-morning darkness, and the wheels of his Suzuki motorcycle slid off the asphalt edge. He tumbled from the bike and was run over by a pickup truck. The deadly accident was one of thousands in highway work zones across the country that have killed at least 4,700 people — more than two a day — and injured 200,000 in the last five years alone. Ubiquitous annoyances of on-the-go American life, work zones are sometimes death traps, too. Behind this human toll is a litany of mundane hazards: concrete barriers in the wrong position, obsolete lane markings left in place, warning signs never deployed.

If someone you know was injured or killed as the result of a highway work zone accident, encourage them to immediately contact a competent attorney for advice. It is extremely important to do this quickly to ensure that evidence is preserved, statements are taken, and the rights of all claimants are protected.