I was in a multi-car pileup on the freeway. Who pays?

A pileup is several crashes that happen in the same place

On I-45, I-10, the 610 Loop, Beltway 8 and US-59, a multi-car crash rarely happens all at once. One car stops short or loses control; the car behind it hits it; the next car hits that one; and cars keep arriving for seconds or minutes afterward. Rain, fog and sudden stops in heavy traffic make Houston freeways especially prone to them.

Legally, each impact is its own event with its own cause. Figuring out who hit whom, in what order, and which impact caused which injury is the first and most important piece of work in a pileup case.

How fault gets divided

Texas uses proportionate responsibility. The jury assigns a percentage of fault to each driver who caused the harm, and each driver generally pays their own share. A driver found more than 50% responsible can be held responsible for the entire amount of the damages. You can recover as long as you are not more than 50% responsible, reduced by your own share.

Defendants can also point to others — a driver who left the scene, a trucking company, a road contractor — as responsible third parties, so that the jury considers their share too. Expect every insurer in a pileup to do exactly that.

The practical problem: many claims, limited insurance

In a serious pileup, several injured people may all be claiming against the same one or two policies. If the total damages exceed the limits, the insurer may try to settle quickly with whoever asks first, or ask a court to divide the policy among everyone. Moving early matters, and so does looking beyond the obvious policy: your own underinsured motorist coverage, other drivers who contributed, and any commercial vehicle involved.

What proves the order of impacts

The damage to each car tells part of the story — front damage, rear damage, or both, and how much. Vehicle crash data can show how many impacts a car sustained and how hard. Traffic cameras, dashcams and witnesses fill in the sequence. The officers who worked the scene may have diagrammed it, but in a large pileup their report is often incomplete. Photographs of every car before the scene is cleared are some of the most valuable evidence you can have.

Bad weather rarely excuses the drivers behind you. Every driver has to keep a safe distance and slow down for rain, fog and traffic ahead. A driver who ran into a line of stopped cars in bad weather was usually going too fast for the conditions.

When an 18-wheeler is part of the pileup

Many of the worst freeway pileups involve a commercial truck, because a loaded tractor-trailer needs far more distance to stop than a car and pushes everything in front of it when it cannot. When a truck is involved, the federal motor carrier rules apply to it, its electronic logs and engine data can show speed and braking in the seconds before the crash, and the carrier’s insurance — at least $750,000 for a for-hire carrier of general freight across state lines, and often much more — may be the largest policy on the scene. That evidence is controlled by the trucking company and is on a short clock, so a preservation letter needs to go out quickly.

Authority: Tex. Civ. Prac. & Rem. Code ch. 33 (proportionate responsibility) · Tex. Transp. Code § 545.062 (following distance)