20 most dangerous counties for fatal crashes with big trucks

A truck crash March 14 in Pittsford, N.Y. Fortunately the truck driver, and three adults and an infant in a car, had only minor injuries. (AP)

We often get email from personal injury law firms that have mined National Highway Traffic Safety Administration crash data for insights. Their motive is presumably to drum up business, but there’s also a PSA aspect, and these pitches can uncover some interesting facts. In today’s data dump from a Boston law firm, we learned that there is a place in the oil fields of West Texas where considerably more than half of all fatal vehicle crashes involve a big truck.

Reeves County, Texas, is pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The county’s biggest town is Pecos, population 13,000, smack in the middle of the Permian Basin oil patch. Reeves County is also where I-10 and I-20 converge, meaning it’s a nexus for cross-country semi-truck travel. And there’s considerable commercial truck traffic involving the oil and gas industry. Pecos is planning to build a bypass road around the town to divert that and hopefully reduce commercial truck accidents. Meanwhile, 56% of fatal crashes there involve a big truck.

In sheer numbers, there aren’t many fatal crashes in Reeves County, or anywhere else on this list — though any fatalities are too many. But as percentages, the numbers are shocking. Even the Georgia county in last place on this top 20 list sees more than a quarter of fatalities involving a truck.

Going straight to NHTSA provides a great deal more data, and puts some of this in perspective: Nationally, 9.3% of fatal crashes involve a large truck, so clearly the counties on this list are serious outliers.

NHTSA defines a large truck as having a gross vehicle weight rating of over 10,000 pounds — that’s a definition that would include not just semi trucks or other commercial trucks, but would even count some heavy-duty pickups. (Of crashes involving a truck of any size, 71% were these large trucks.) 

In 2021, the last year for which data are available, traffic crashes with large trucks killed 5,788 people. That’s up 17% over 2020. Of those who lost their lives, 72% were occupants of other vehicles, a not-surprising but sobering fact of physics when heavy objects and light objects share the road.

And often not mentioned in these law-firm assessments are the numbers of those who were not killed. NHTSA says an estimated 154,993 people were injured in large-truck crashes.

The counties on this list are pretty rural: Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma. You can imagine that long stretches of desolate highway, speed and a grueling schedule come into play there. Though NHTSA’s report does not assign blame in these crashes.

It’s all a reminder to be extra cautious when out there with the big rigs.

Here is a national map from NHTSA that provides a bigger picture, followed by the law firms’ list of 20 worst counties by percentage:

Large trucks as a percentage of vehicles in fatal crashes, 2021

Most dangerous counties for fatal accidents with big trucks