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In a tolling bell, a grim message about preventable truck deaths

2023-10-06 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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When Marianne Karth arrived in D.C. on Wednesday, she brought with her a thick, black binder.

Inside, tucked in plastic sleeves, slips of paper held the names, ages and photos of people who have died after ending up under tractor-trailers and other large trucks.

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Those types of crashes have a name: underride. If you have never heard that term, you’re lucky. Karth and other family members of crash victims say they learned it only after they had reason to grieve.

Two of those names in that binder belong to Karth’s daughters, AnnaLeah and Mary. They were 17 and 13 and riding in a car Karth was driving in 2013 when traffic slowed and the driver of a truck did not stop in time. The truck slammed into the family’s car, causing it to spin and slide partially under a tractor-trailer.

Karth and her son were sitting in the front of the car and survived. Her daughters were in the back seat and did not.

“They were robbed,” Karth told me recently. “They were robbed of all their hopes and dreams and all the gifts and the skills and the love they had. It just ended. It just ended for no good reason.”

It ended, she will tell you, because the tractor-trailer that crushed their car did not have a strong enough rear guard to deflect their vehicle.

“It’s not usually the crash that kills — it’s the underride,” Karth said. “That happens over and over again.”

Underride deaths have happened on roads across the country, and they have happened to people driving in cars, riding bikes and walking. More than 700 names appear in that binder. Most of them represent people who have been killed in underride crashes in the last three years. Karth gathered the names by following up on Google alerts, reading through obituaries and talking with other families. But underride crashes remain undercounted by authorities and underreported by the media, so there is no way for her to compile a comprehensive list.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Karth said of the people in her binder. “These are the ones you can find, but there are many more out there. We just don’t have their names.”

On Thursday, Karth and another mother who lost a child in an underride crash, Lois Durso, plan to walk from the U.S. Capitol to the Transportation Department’s building while ringing a bell for those unnamed underride victims. Then, once in front of the building, they will ring a heavier bronze bell and read the names in the binder.

One of them belongs to Sarah Langenkamp, a U.S. diplomat who left Ukraine and was getting her family settled in the Washington region when she was killed while riding her bicycle from an open house event at her sons’ elementary school. She was riding along a road in Bethesda when the driver of a flatbed truck turned right into a parking lot, police said.

I became aware of the issue of underride crashes and the calls for safety guards on large trucks while talking to Dan Langenkamp last November about his wife’s death. Those structural guards were one of several measures he and others were calling on federal officials to put in place to improve truck safety. Langenkamp told me at the time that what his wife experienced was not gentle and that people needed to know that so they could fully understand what traffic victims and their families experience.

A grieving father retraces his wife’s last route — then goes further

“These deaths are really violent,” he said. “We should not cover that up. Nobody should be killed on our streets like this. People say she was ‘struck by a truck’ or ‘hit by a truck.’ No, she was crushed by a truck.”

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Langenkamp plans to attend Thursday’s event. He said he can’t say whether his wife would have survived the crash if that truck had side underride guards — but she might have.

“There’s a clear geometric problem that large trucks pose to cars and people because they are so high up,” he said. “It’s a geometric problem that we’ve known about for decades. I don’t see any reason in the world why we can’t do what other countries do and make trucks safer by requiring side guards. This is a basic, inexpensive fix that is proven to save lives.”

That’s the thing. Those safety guards have been tested, patented and mandated in other countries. But even though Karth, Durso and other grieving relatives have long been calling on federal officials to require that trucks in the United States install side underride guards and improve the strength of rear guards, they’ve had to keep fighting to be heard. Instead, they have seen the trucking industry push back on the need and federal officials point to high costs and low benefits. An advance notice of proposed rulemaking released this year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated a side underride requirement would save about 17 lives and prevent 69 serious injuries a year at an annual cost between $970 million and $1.2 billion.

Karth, Durso and others have criticized that estimate as flawed. Durso, like Langenkamp, doesn’t soften the details of her daughter’s death, and what happened to her daughter shows how underride deaths are undercounted.

The crash occurred the night before Thanksgiving in 2004. Her 26-year-old daughter, Roya Sadigh, was riding in a car with her fiancé. The roads were icy, and the car spun out of control and collided with the side of a tractor-trailer. Roya’s side of the car ended up under the truck. Her fiance’s side didn’t. He survived. She didn’t.

“It basically crushed her to death as the seat belt held her in,” Durso said. “Her hair was actually on the tire of the trailer. But when we got the [Fatality Analysis Reporting System] report, it showed her death was not counted as an underride. It was not counted correctly.”

Karth and Durso visited their daughters’ gravesites together in the days before they flew from Michigan to Washington. They spent some time meeting with officials in the office of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday.

On Thursday, they expected other grieving families and local road safety advocates to join them as they publicly relayed a message to Buttigieg and other federal officials — “delay equals death” — and rang those bells, over and over again.

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