Travel Safety January 7, 2014

The New York State Thruway between Buffalo, in Erie County and Ripley in Chautauqua County, near the Pennsylvania state border remains closed this morning. As a truck accident attorney I am happy about this because the closing was a very good safety measure. Big rigs, particularly empty ones can be difficult to operate in poor conditions and the trailers can be blown over if empty in the windy conditions that exist currently.

Often truck drivers are pressured by management to get the loads to destination by certain day and time. It’s easy for management or dispatch sitting in a different city to not understand the difficulty in operating a tractor-trailer when there is very poor visibility which can happen almost instantly in the lake effect bands which occur off Lake Erie and Lake Ontario in upstate New York very often in the vicinity of Dunkirk , Angola, and surrounding areas and also in Erie County, near Hamburg and Lackawanna and Genesee County surrounding Batavia, New York. If you do have to drive, drive safe.