Stoughton Underride Guard Earns Kudos from Crash Survivor, Insurance Institute
Photos: Stoughton Trailers
“>
Photos: Stoughton Trailers
“>
NASHVILLE — The efforts of the design and engineering team at Stoughton Trailers to improve the design of the trailer rear underride guard has earned the company the ToughGuard Award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and the respect of Marianne Karth, a survivor of a rear-impact crash that took the lives of two of her daughters.
On May 4, 2013, Karth was driving her full-size sedan when she was struck by a tractor-trailer, sending her car spinning backward into the rear of another tractor-trailer. The tractor-trailer’s rear underride guard could not withstand the crash and detached from the trailer, allowing Ms. Karth’s car to slide backward under the trailer. The trunk of the car went under the rear of the trailer at the outer edge, and the back of the trailer body entered the back seat of Ms. Karth’s car, killing her 17-year-old daughter, Anna Leah, instantly. Mary Lydia, her 13-year-old daughter, died a few days later from her critical injuries.
That tractor-trailer’s rear underride guard met the 1998 Federal underride standards. In 2011, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety tested underride guards of eight major trailer manufacturers. All of the underride guards tested met the Federal standards of the day, but none of them were able to stop underride on the outer edges — the so-called 30-percent offset zone.
Subsequent IIHS testing performed in March 2013 — just two months before the Karth’s fatal crash — revealed that only one of the eight manufacturers had designed their guard to successfully prevent underride at the outer edges.
Once the IIHS findings were published, Karth began advocating for safer tractor-trailers. She even filed her own petition for an improved underride rulemaking that went to the Department of Transportation on May 5, 2014. In addition, her husband, Jerry, began writing letters to …Read the rest of this story
