What should you do if you’ve been involved in a multiple car collision?

I’m not talking about an instance in which it’s two or three cars and you’ve been hit from behind and you hit the person in front of you. What I’m talking about is the instance in which say you’re traveling on the interstate. There’s inclement weather. There’s standing water on the road. Somebody makes a mistake. They’re driving too fast for conditions or perhaps they’re driving too close to the person in front of them. They hit on the brakes. They do whatever it is that’s negligent that causes a chain reaction to begin.

So they hit the person to the right of them or possibly the person who’s in front of them and it causes that chain reaction in which everybody behind them sees that wreck happening and then they all adjust. Usually what ends up happening is you’ve got that initial wreck and then you’ve got maybe a person who’s coming up. They’re 50 yards behind them and they just – they don’t see it in time. They clip them but they’re trying to avoid them.

In these particular instances, you can have five, six, seven, eight different people all of whom have been involved in a motor vehicle collision. The downside of that is, is the police have to come in and try to piece together what actually happened by talking to all the witnesses, all the various parties and then you’ve got eight different insurance companies. You can see how it becomes increasingly more complex.

What the cops have to do is figure out what that initial instant of negligence actually was because essentially, the insurance is going to hinge on that person’s insurance. So whatever liability coverage they’ve got, the person who actually started that chain reaction, they’re the ones who are going to be on the hook.

All the other people, potentially depending on what they’re doing, it’s possible that one of them could potentially be found negligent as well, but typically it’s going to start with that first car. Eighty percent of people on the highways of South Carolina are carrying South Carolina minimum, which means they’ve got 25, 50 in coverage. They’ve got $25,000. They’ve got $50,000 from multiple people who are making claims against them.

So the pot is essentially $50,000. If you’ve got a wreck at a high speed on an interstate at 70 miles an hour with inclement weather, you’re looking at probably significant injuries and certainly significant collisions and property damage.

The injuries and the medical bills and the property damage are going to far outpace whatever that  

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initial car actually has in coverage. All of those various drivers going all the way back are going to hope to fall back on either their uninsured or their underinsured motorist coverage depending on how the numbers play out and what that initial driver has.

It’s very fact-specific and like I said, there can be other instances of negligence that occur but it’s really – the cops are trying to find a needle in a haystack because you’re trying to put something together that happens over maybe three or four seconds in time and you’re doing it with the spotty recollections and memories of people who are trying to protect their own interest because maybe they think they somehow contributed and God forbid their insurance premium should actually go up.

It’s a fact-specific inquiry and it’s certainly something that you’re not going to want to try to take care of yourself. I would strongly encourage you to seek out a lawyer. Lawyers, this is what we do for a living and we’ve met with these instances and we’ve worked through these incredibly complex scenarios. So we’ve been there and we’ve done that.

If you’ve been involved in a multiple car collision, I would strongly encourage you to pick up the telephone and contact the Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600.