The Role of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration in Truck Accident Cases 

The Federal Motor Carrier safety administration in and of itself likely will not get involved in your personal Farah & Farah trucking crash but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration enacts regulations that permeate every single trucking crash case that Farah & Farah has I can go down probably 20 or 30 different regulations that impact a Farah & Farah trucking crash case but the most important start with the truck drivers themselves they’re not employees of these big corporations you see on the side of a tractor trailer but the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations say that they are employees what does that mean for our Farah & Farah truck and crash clients well what it means is when you see that name on the side of a truck that company is responsible for anything that that truck driver does and the primary reason that is so straightforward and so simple is because of the regulations contained in the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations.

Secondly, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations have limitations on the hours that a truck driver can be on the road for all of the companies are required to log that driver’s time so that it is kept but as we were talking about earlier this is why it’s important to get a truck crash attorney very early on those companies are only required to maintain those records for a period of 6 months after that they can be destroyed so you want to jump on it quickly so that we can get that information and get it preserved why because truck drivers often exceed the maximum allowable amount of hours that they’re able to drive either straight in one trip or over the course of a couple of weeks so we want to have that information as well the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations also impact the truck itself or he vehicle itself for example if it’s a night time trucking crash one of the things we look at Farah & Farah is whether or not the truck itself had sufficient Safety Striping on the sides of it the regulations require that if you’re looking at a length on the part of a truck the reflective tape has to cover at least 50% of that length to warn oncoming drivers that there’s a truck there.

I’ve had multiple cases where we haven’t had that on the truck itself and it’s important, because that helped us establish liability on the part of our client the regulations also discuss pre-trip inspections are the brakes working properly are the mirrors adjusted properly is the truck otherwise operable over the public roadways of the State of Florida because every truck driver is required to perform a pre-trip inspection that’s also contained within the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations but your Farah & Farah truck crash attorney will research those regulations and make sure we know which ones apply to your crash.