ATLANTA — It was almost midnight when Walter Price eased his 18-wheeler into the right lane on Interstate 75 near Atlanta. As he began to bank onto the exit ramp he’d been taking for the past 10 years, Price had no idea he was entering America’s most dangerous hot zone for truck drivers.
As Price rounded the curve onto Exit 238-B that cold night in February 2012, a small black car darted in front of him on an otherwise deserted highway. The car’s driver slammed on the brakes to negotiate the exit’s sharp curve. Price had to veer left and hit his brakes to avoid a collision. But the curve was too sharp and Price’s 36-ton rig carrying car parts began to roll.
“Once you hear the freight break loose and start sliding, there’s absolutely nothing you can do,” the veteran truck driver recalled. “You can kiss your ass goodbye.”
Price was lucky. He survived his rollover, every trucker’s worst nightmare. Many others do not. Each year, hundreds of truck drivers die across the country on congested roadways and antiquated exit ramps like the one where Price crashed, a national crisis in which a crumbling interstate highway system, designed in the mid-1950s, is bearing the ever more burdensome loads of a booming trucking industry.
Although they accounted for just 3.3 percent of all large-truck crashes, rollovers were responsible for more than half of the deaths to drivers and their occupants in 2012, the most recent year for which data is available. That’s 300 truck occupant deaths and 3,000 injuries every year.
Outdated highway engineering and growing gridlock can lead to rollovers as a booming trucking industry puts greater strain on the nation’s aging roadways.
The almost 10 billion tons of freight carried annually is taking such a toll on the nation’s highways that politicians of all stripes are angling to raise the money needed to fix them.
“Because so many curves were made 40 years ago, they don’t have the banking needed for the trucks of today,” said Steve Niswander, vice president of safety policy at the Groendyke Transport trucking company in Enid, Okla. “But to lengthen out and expand cloverleafs in probably 50 areas in the United States would take billions.”
Nowhere do mid-century roadways and 21st century congestion collide with such deadly force as in Atlanta, where a tangle of twisting roadways and densely packed moving traffic combine to create America’s extreme tipping point. More than 200 trucks have flipped around Atlanta since 2001, according to a study by the American Transportation Research Institute. And more than 200 people have died in truck rollovers in Georgia during that time.
The Top 10 rollover hot spots in the Atlanta area all involve exit ramps that require a rapid reduction in speed and often have sightlines obscured by bridges or the curvature of the road.
