Mom of crash victims fights for increased truck safety

Underride guards for tractor trailers target of campaign.

Crash into the back of a tractor trailer, and an underride guard could mean the difference between a broken nose or having your head ripped off.

An underride guard is a steel, energy-absorbing bar that hangs off the back of a semitrailer, or along its sides, keeping cars from getting jammed underneath in a collision.

Without them, such wrecks typically shear the tops off cars. A side guard might have spared Hafiz Ilyas, who was burned alive when his car got wedged under a Freightliner on Interstate 85 in October 2013.

But for decades, the trucking industry has resisted efforts to strengthen federal underride guard requirements for carriers. There are currently no mandates for side guards, and truckers can get away with having shoddy, rusted-out rear guards that give out in a crash, killing motorists.

One of the leading figures in the fight for tougher regulations — the resistance to the resistance — is a mother who lost two daughters in a 2013 crash in Georgia’s Greene County, near I-20 exit 130.

At the time, the family was only passing through Georgia. Marianne Karth and her children were en route from their new home in Rocky Mount, N.C., to Arlington, Texas to celebrate four of her nine children’s college graduations and her oldest daughter’s wedding, according to a blog by a personal injury attorney.

Karth’s daughters AnnaLeah, 17, and Mary, 13, were riding in the back seat of their Ford Crown Victoria when a tractor trailer sideswiped the car, spun it backward, then struck it again. The Karth’s car plowed backward into the rear of another truck.

The second truck had a rear guard, but it gave way upon impact. The car’s back seat was completely crushed. AnnaLeah died that day. Mary was hospitalized and died after several strokes.

“I wish it had been me instead of them,” Marianne Karth told Washington D.C.’s WUSA 9. “It was so unexpected, so traumatic, so unnecessary, and I don’t want it to happen to anyone else.”

Karth and her husband have petitioned Congress, the U.S. Department of Transportation and trailer manufactures to improve underride guards and mandate new safety requirements.

Crash tests by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety have found that many underride guards in use by truckers won’t prevent underride crashes, even at low speeds, which the Karth family tragically learned in Georgia.

CONTRIBUTED BY THE INSURANCE INSTITUTE FOR HIGHWAY SAFETY A car crashes underneath a semitrailer in a 35 mph crash test. Parents whose daughters were killed in such a crash are lobbying for trucks to be equipped with guards to stop cars from going beneath trucks in such crashes. Fast Copy News Service wrote...