On April 10, 2014, a tour bus full of high school students were on their way to tour college campuses when a FedEx truck pulling a double trailer crossed over the median and hit them head on. One of the students said he saw the trailers “skewed at a weird angle” before the truck hit them. The truck was pulling two trailers , something the transportation industry calls “hauling doubles”.  In the fiery crash, 5 students and 5 adults were killed. Yesterday, April 14, 2015, 21 year old Kelsey Dearmon was killed when a truck hauling doubles crossed over the median on Interstate 840 in Smyrna near the Rutherford and Wilson County lines. The impact was so great that the driver seat was ejected from the car and the entire rear axle was knocked out. The interstate was shut down while the accident reconstruction team investigated and also until it was determined that the hazardous material hauled in the trailers was not leaking.

Kelsey was a beautiful and vibrant young lady beloved by her family and friends and she was minding her own business in her own lane when her young life was cut short.

While it is too early to know the exact cause of the crash, safety organizations across the country have been advocating for the “single truck – single trailer” rule for tractor trailer trucks. In addition to being harder to steer, more susceptible to inclement weather or high winds, and harder for vehicles to negotiate around as the truck’s driver has severely limited sight lines around his rig and both trailers – there is the added danger of two trailers being twice as heavy, twice as deadly, and holding twice the tonnage in possibly harmful materials.

As the Dearmon family mourns the loss of their loved one, I hope that transportation companies will stop pushing the boundaries of safety on our roads by pressuring drivers to drive when they are tired, setting unrealistic arrival times that result in excessive speed by the truck drivers, and especially stop the greedy practice of hooking two trailers to one truck. These companies make fantastically large amounts of money, they should hire the extra driver and buy the extra rig to haul the extra loads.