Texas Tips for Preventing Fatal Rollaway Accidents | DENENA | POINTS

Texas Tips for Preventing Fatal Rollaway Accidents

You might know that vehicles occasionally roll out of their supposedly secure  “park” and “off” positions to damage property, and kill or maim their drivers or innocent bystanders. Such an accident happened just this week in Houston where a Ford truck ran over its elderly driver as he was stopped at an ATM machine.

Our Houston car accident injury attorneys point out that in postal delivery companies, where drivers might make dozens of stops per day, drivers sometimes become complacent or simply pressured by delivery deadlines and don’t always take all necessary steps to secure their vehicles. And their trucks are even more likely than yours to have worn parking gears that might not fully engage.

A document I noticed online, which was apparently intended as internal document for one of these postal delivery entities, indicated the heavy financial liabilities that the company might suffer as its trucks ran over employees, other persons, and property. The document mentioned that the company was experiencing at least one unintended rollaway accident per delivery day. That statistic no doubt becomes quite expensive. And the document begged drivers to take all possible precautions to secure their vehicles before they exited to deliver their mail.

Some Tips for Preventing a Fatal Rollaway Accident:

  1. Always place your gear selector in “Park” when you exit your vehicle.
  2. Turn off your engine.
  3. Remove your key from the ignition.
  4. Set the parking brake.
  5. Curb and/or turn the wheels to minimize vehicle travel distance should any of the above steps fail to keep vehicle from rolling and/or running away. Sometimes vehicles have inherent “unintended acceleration” problems or other defects that could defeat your other measures, so the Houston car accident injury attorneys at Denena Points, PC urge you to assume the worst, and be sure to take precautions.

Click the link to read about the recent fatall rollaway accident in Houston that took the life of an unsuspecting Ford  pickup driver.