This story was originally published by ProPublica.
For decades, federal safety regulators in the US ignored credible scientific research and failed to take simple steps to stop gruesome roadway crashes involving heavy trucks. Meanwhile, the bodies piled up.
It was a little after 7 p.m. and Ricardo Marcos was rolling through the darkness in his gray Hyundai Elantra.
Marcos had spent a long day toiling as mechanic at a trucking company in McAllen, Texas, a sunbaked city nestled right on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Now he was headed home on U.S. Route 281, a long swath of asphalt that runs parallel to the Rio Grande in this part of Texas. His wife, Irma Orive, was waiting for him.
But Marcos, 61, never made it.
Big commercial trucks are ubiquitous in this part of the world, an endless stream of massive diesel-powered vehicles ferrying goods across the border, and on his drive home, Marcos encountered a large truck pulling a 53-foot trailer. The truck edged out of a driveway and began, slowly, to turn left onto the road, blocking traffic in both directions. It was as if someone had erected a big steel wall.
Video shows what happened next on that night in 2017. Traveling at more than 40 mph, Marcos’s Hyundai slammed violently into the larger vehicle and became wedged beneath it. The impact ripped the top half of the car apart. Marcos did not survive.
The collision did terrible things to his body, breaking his ribs, lacerating his liver and spleen, snapping his neck and damaging the frontal lobes of his brain, according to the medical examiner’s report.
An investigator with the local police department blamed the collision on the truck driver, who was initially charged with negligent homicide, though charges were eventually dropped. ProPublica and FRONTLINE were unable to contact the trucker.
“I still miss him. I miss him every day,” said his widow, 70. “We did everything together.”
The incident was awful and tragic. But it wasn’t particularly uncommon. Collisions in which a passenger vehicle such as a car, SUV or pickup truck slides beneath a large commercial truck are called underride crashes in the jargon of the transportation industry. And they happen all the time: Each year hundreds of Americans die in this type of collision.
The federal government has been aware of the problem for at least five decades.
Reporters for ProPublica and FRONTLINE obtained thousands of pages of government documents on underride crashes — technical research reports, meeting notes, memoranda and correspondence — dating back to the 1960s. The records reveal a remarkable and disturbing hidden history, a case study of government inaction in the face of an obvious threat to public wellbeing. Year after year, federal officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the country’s primary roadway safety agency, ignored credible scientific research and failed to take simple steps to limit the hazards of underride crashes.
NHTSA officials failed to act, in part, because they didn’t know how many people were killed in the crashes. Their poor efforts at collecting data over the years left them unable to determine the scale of the problem. This spring the agency publicly acknowledged that it has failed to accurately count underride collisions for decades.
According to NHTSA’s latest figures, more than 400 people died in underride crashes in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available. But experts say the true number of deaths is likely higher.
Records show the agency often deferred to the wishes of the trucking industry, whose lobbyists repeatedly complained that simple safety measures would be prohibitively expensive and do lasting damage to the American economy. During the 1980s, for example, industry leaders argued they couldn’t afford to equip trucks with stronger rear bumpers, which are also called rear underride guards; the devices are meant to prevent cars from slipping beneath the trailer during a rear-end collision. The beefier, more robust rear guards would’ve cost an additional $127 each, according to industry estimates.
David Friedman was a top official at NHTSA during the Obama years. “NHTSA has been trying, for decades, to do something about underride deaths. And yet over and over, they haven’t made the progress that we need. Why? Well, I think part of it is because industry just keeps pushing back and undermining their efforts,” said Friedman, who served as the agency’s acting administrator in 2014. “There are so many hurdles put in the way of NHTSA staff when it comes to putting a rule on the books that could address issues like underride.”
The technology at issue — strong steel guards mounted to the back and sides of trucks — is simple and “relatively inexpensive,” Friedman argued. “The costs are small.”...
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