Truck Accident Attorneys In Yakima

If you’ve been in an accident with an 18-wheel truck in Yakima that wasn’t your fault, you have options for seeking compensation. The Yakima personal injury attorneys at Tamaki Law can help you file a personal injury lawsuit for compensation for your injuries and get your life back on track. Don’t let an accident with a truck determine the course of your future. Call Tamaki Law toll-free at (509) 248-8338 for a free consultation, and we’ll show you how we’ve helped thousands of other clients get compensation and how we can do the same for you.

Truck Accidents in Yakima

Washington, and the Yakima valley especially, has no shortage of dangerous roadways. Sections of I-82 can be tricky in good weather conditions, but when the weather gets wet or icy, they can become downright treacherous. The large number of commuters and large trucks that use this interstate to move across the Yakima valley means it’s always a hot spot for accidents, especially between passenger cars and trucks.

A truck accident is different from an accident involving passenger cars for several reasons. To start with, trucks are enormous. A standard over-the-road 18-wheeler can be over 70 feet long, eight feet wide, and can weigh over 80,000 pounds. Maneuvering a vehicle that big is never easy,  and sharing the road with cars that are one-eighth the size can be a recipe for disaster. Trucks are notorious for having bad outward visibility. A truck is surrounded by what federal regulators call “no-zones,” or areas where the driver cannot see. These “no-zones” include directly behind the trailer, directly beside the driver, a large area on the passenger side of the cab, and a small area directly in front of the cab. If a passenger car stays in one of these “no-zones” for too long and the driver loses sight of them, an accident is likely to occur.

Circumstances don’t get better when you leave the interstate. Trucks are hard to maneuver on an open four-lane roadway, but when you get to the city streets of Yakima, even though the speeds drop, trucks are just as dangerous. Making a right turn in a truck requires swinging wide to prevent the trailer from striking the corner, which can catch other motorists off guard and result in an accident. When trucks reach their destination and have to back the trailer up to a loading dock to deliver their cargo, they have even less visibility and an even greater chance of hitting another vehicle.

Why Tamaki Law for My Truck Accident?

Choosing the right attorney to represent you can be difficult. Tamaki Law specializes in injury claims like truck accidents, and we’ve helped thousands of clients get compensation for their injuries since 1994. We are a small, dedicated group of attorneys and legal professionals who believe personal injury law is about more than just money. It’s about restoring your life after a traumatic experience.

With our three offices in Yakima, Kennewick, and Bellevue, we’ve helped residents in Washington and across the country to get just and fair compensation for their accidents and injuries. We treat our clients with dignity and compassion while they go through this difficult experience because we fully understand the hardship an accident or injury can place on you and your family.

We also take pride in giving back to the communities that have helped us to thrive by supporting several charities, causes, and organizations with monetary donations. See our Giving Back page for more information.

The main reason you should choose Tamaki Law to assist with your injury claim is that we get positive results. Since 1994, we’ve helped our clients obtain hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements and awards. We can’t guarantee that we can get you compensation for your injuries, but we can guarantee that we will apply the same skill and determination to your claim as we have to others. Check out our Testimonials page to hear from some of our satisfied clients.

Who Is Responsible for My Truck Accident?

Determining liability for an accident involving a large truck can be more difficult than finding who’s at fault in an accident involving passenger cars. This is due to the increased number of people who bear some responsibility for the truck and its contents.

A truck isn’t always owned by the driver. It can be owned by a trucking or shipping company. There’s also the owner of the freight, contractors that provide services to the trucking company like maintenance, and the manufacturer of the truck itself. Depending on the circumstances of the accident, any or all of these parties may bear some liability.

For example, say you’re driving with your family up Hwy 12 to Rimrock Lake. While en route, you have to brake suddenly for a construction vehicle that’s stopped in the road to repair a pothole. The semi-truck following you is unable to brake fast enough to avoid rear-ending your vehicle, which causes severe damage and injuries. In this scenario, liability may be spread across several different parties. The truck driver may have been following too closely or reading a text message. The trucking company may have asked the driver to ignore federal laws regarding the amount of time they can spend driving to get the shipment delivered on time. The maintenance vendor may not have serviced the brakes on the truck properly, increasing the stopping distance, or the truck’s manufacturer may have missed installing a critical part on the braking system. In this scenario, even the company contracted to complete the road maintenance may share responsibility if they didn’t have adequate signage warning of the work being done. Any or all of these parties could be found responsible for the accident, pending an investigation.

Washington also follows a comparative negligence, or contributory fault law. This law states that any party sharing responsibility for an accident will have any cash settlement or award reduced by the percentage of fault they share. So, in the scenario above, if it’s discovered that you were driving too fast for conditions or distracted from the roadway at the time of the accident, you may share a portion of responsibility, expressed as a percentage. If a judge finds that you are 25 percent responsible for the accident, any award or settlement you are found to be entitled to would be reduced by 25 percent.