You’re heading down the interstate toward your house after a day of work. You took a late shift, so it’s 10:00 in the evening, and you’re feeling tired. But you’re not so tired that you don’t realize the headlights coming toward you are in your lane.
What’s happened is that someone is driving the wrong direction down the interstate, into oncoming traffic. It’s an astounding event; you can’t imagine making a mistake like that yourself. So how did it happen?
Serious accidents with a common cause
Safety experts warn that wrong-way accidents are some of the most serious crashes that can ever occur, with very high chances of being fatal. Much of this has to do with the speed of the vehicles involved. These are also almost always head-on crashes, which tend to be much more dangerous.
The common cause, in a lot of cases, is that the wrong way drivers are impaired in some fashion. The most frequent type of impairment is simply from alcohol. However, this can also happen with drug impairment or anything else that makes it easier for someone to make a critical mistake like entering the interstate via an exit ramp.
There are some cases in which a driver is just young and inexperienced or elderly and confused, but these are not as common as otherwise competent drivers simply being impaired and making errors they never would have made they had just been sober.
If you get injured in one of these accidents, which are so hard to avoid, then you absolutely need to know about all of the legal steps you can take to seek compensation from the driver who caused the crash.
