• 03
  • February
    2012

Look at the opening between the ground and the back of most tractor-trailers. Most likely you will notice that this opening is enough room for a car to simply slide right underneath the trailer in a trucking accident. However, safety officials know this, which is why most semitrailers are required to have an underride guard, also known as an ICC bar, attached to the back of their trailer. This bar is supposed to stop a car from sliding underneath.

In theory, this makes sense. The ICC bar is made of steel, and is either welded or bolted on. But, even though this seems like a pretty safe strategy, it turns out that these bars tend to break and bend, and passenger vehicles still slide underneath the trucks. This puts the driver of the vehicle in great danger, as the car can continue to slide until the back of the trailer is touching the driver's seat.

About a year ago the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a number of safety test crashes to see how well this ICC bar would work. All of the bars that were tested were up to government standard, and even the cars that were used had received the highest crash test ratings in terms of safety.

In those crash tests, the ICC bar would break and bend and the car would end up underneath the truck.

Of course in these tests, dummies were put into the cars as drivers. But sadly, a real-life scenario ended up recently playing out. In that incident, there was a 50-car pileup. In that multi-vehicle crash, the driver of a Toyota Camry had attempted to swerve and miss striking the back of a trailer. Sadly, the crash was unavoidable, and his vehicle went barreling into -- and then under -- the trailer.

The driver of that Camry later died from the head injuries he sustained in the crash. An investigation found that the ICC bar on the tractor-trailer he hit had also broke and bent.

Looking to the future, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is aware of the issues, and is continuing to investigate these ICC bars to see what kind of changes need to be made in order to stop these devastating accidents from continuing to happen.

Source: WSMV Channel 4, "Required safety devices on trailers break in test crashes," Jeremy Finley, Feb. 2, 2012