Seeing a large truck barrel toward your vehicle is scary enough, but what if that happened and you realized there was no driver behind the wheel? When you see that trucker in the driver's seat, there's at least a little hope that they will hit their brakes in time.
Unfortunately, with no one to stop the vehicle, things get terrifying very quickly.
Some residents of a Seattle neighborhood were confronted with the scenario recently when a runaway box truck went loose on their streets.
A truck driver from St. Vincent de Paul was loading donated goods into the back of a 24-foot truck at about noon in the 2600 block of East Ward Street. The truck suddenly started rolling down the hill, and the truck driver was injured when he jumped from the back of the truck.
Five parked cars were damaged as the truck rolled down the street:
- A silver Toyota at the top of 26th Avenue East had rear passenger-side fender damage when it was clipped by the truck.
- The truck plowed into a gray BMW, pushing the BMW into a garage door and then a red SUV into a tree.
- Finally, the truck hit a green Toyota Prius and a dark BMW at the bottom of the hill, causing it to finally stop. The Prius had the worst damage because its front end was crushed under the truck.
In this situation, the owners of the cars were lucky because they weren't in them at the time of the accident. The only person injured in this ordeal was the driver of the truck, when he jumped from the back.
This is definitely an incident that could have been much worse if more people were on the road at the time, so all of us at our Seattle truck accident law firm are glad things worked out the way they did.
