A 91 year old man from Lenoir, North Carolina was killed in a tractor trailer crash near Catawba on Feb. 19. The elderly man was going east on US Highway 70 E when he made a left turn onto Oxford School Road.

A tractor trailer hit the car on the driver’s side and pushed it into a ditch. The man was killed at the scene. One witness said several people heard the accident and ran to the scene to help the injured. Other witnesses said that accidents occur often at this intersection.

Our View

Our North Carolina truck accident attorneys are saddened that a man lost his life in this accident. In this case, it sounded as if the truck driver may have contributed to the accident.

Right of way accidents are common across the country, both in tractor trailer crashes and other accidents with only passenger vehicles. It is important to note that the law never actually grants the right of way.

Rather, the law states when a driver must yield right of way. Right of way may be utilized when the law allows it to be used by mandating that others yield right of way to you. Failure to yield often leads to serious accidents across the country. There are some easy ways to ensure you are not in a right of way accident. Just keep in mind that you must yield right of way in these cases:

• Where there is a yield sign
• When there are pedestrians in a crosswalk
• In an uncontrolled intersection where vehicles are already in the intersection
• At a T intersection when you have to yield to vehicles who are on the thru road
• When you are turning left and you must yield to other vehicles
• When getting back on the road after your car was parked

Serious accidents are common when a driver fails to yield the right of way. For example, our Virginia  Beach personal injury attorneys represented a client who was seriously hurt when another driver failed to yield right of way when he was entering Virginia Beach Blvd. A violent crash led to emergency crews coming to the scene. Our client had serious orthopedic injuries that required him to be removed by EMTs from the vehicle.

Our client was in the hospital and eventually needed four separate foot and ankle surgeries on his lower legs. Our legal team used a vocational assessment to establish what he would have made in the time he was off work; this amount was $612,000. We settled this case for $1 million.