Cargo Securement Truck Accidents

Some truck accidents are not about the driving at all. A load of steel coils breaks loose on a curve and the trailer follows it over. A flatbed sheds a bundle of lumber onto the interstate and the car three lengths back has nowhere to go. A tanker that was legal on paper slosh-rolls in a lane change because it was three-quarters full. Cattle shift in a turn and a trailer that was tracking perfectly is on its side in the median. In every one of those cases the carrier’s insurer will describe the crash as an unforeseeable accident, and in every one of them the federal regulations say otherwise. Cargo securement is one of the most specific, numerical bodies of rules in all of trucking, and a load that came loose is, almost by definition, a load that violated them. This page is about how I prove that, who answers for it, and why the shipper that loaded the trailer is often a defendant alongside the carrier.

The Rule Is Physics, Written Down

Part 393 of the federal motor carrier safety regulations, which Nebraska has adopted into state law by statute, sets performance standards for every load a commercial truck carries. The cargo securement system must be able to withstand a forward deceleration of eight-tenths of the force of gravity, and a rearward or sideways force of half of gravity, without the load shifting. Those numbers are not arbitrary. Eight-tenths of a g is roughly a hard, full-braking stop on dry pavement; half a g is a sharp evasive lane change or a tight ramp. The regulation is saying, in effect, that a properly secured load survives the worst thing a driver should ever have to do with the truck. When a load moves during an ordinary braking event or an ordinary curve, the securement failed the standard, and the question becomes why.

The general requirements go further. Cargo must be firmly immobilized or secured on or within the vehicle by structures of adequate strength, dunnage, shoring, tiedowns or a combination. Articles likely to roll must be restrained by chocks, wedges or cradles. Articles placed beside each other and secured by transverse tiedowns must be in direct contact or prevented from shifting toward each other. And the aggregate working load limit of the tiedowns on any article must be at least one-half of the article’s weight — a 20,000-pound coil needs tiedowns whose combined rated capacity is at least 10,000 pounds, and the rating counts the weakest component in each tiedown assembly, not the strongest.

Tiedown Math, and How Often It Is Wrong

The minimum number of tiedowns is a formula. An article five feet or shorter and weighing 1,100 pounds or less needs one. Anything longer than five feet or heavier than 1,100 pounds needs two. Anything longer than ten feet needs two for the first ten feet and one more for every additional ten feet or fraction of ten feet. A thirty-one-foot bundle needs four; a thirty-three-foot bundle also needs four, because the fraction rounds up. Those are minimums, and they assume the tiedowns are in usable condition, properly tensioned, protected from the edges that would cut them, and attached to anchor points rated for the load. In practice, I see loads secured with the right number of straps that were worn, frayed, cut at the corners or attached to rusted anchor points that let go under a load they were rated to hold. The strap count was legal; the securement was not.

The commodity-specific rules add another layer. There are separate, detailed provisions for logs, dressed lumber and building products, metal coils, paper rolls, concrete pipe, intermodal containers, automobiles and light trucks, heavy vehicles and equipment, flattened or crushed vehicles, roll-on/roll-off containers and large boulders. Metal coils alone have rules for coils with eyes vertical, eyes crosswise and eyes lengthwise, each with its own tiedown geometry. A carrier that hauls coils and secures them the way it secures lumber has violated a regulation written specifically to prevent the crash that followed. Proving that requires someone who reads the load, the trailer and the rulebook together — which is what a cargo securement case is.

The Fifty-Mile Rule and the Driver’s Duty to Look

The driver is not allowed to trust the load. Federal rules require the driver to inspect the cargo and its securement devices within the first fifty miles after beginning a trip and to make any adjustments necessary, and then to reexamine the load and the securement whenever the driver changes duty status, or after three hours of driving or 150 miles, whichever comes first. Those inspections are supposed to be logged, and on an electronic logging device they show up as duty-status changes at specific times and places. When a load comes off a flatbed two hundred miles into a run and the ELD shows no stop, no inspection and no duty-status change since the yard, the driver’s violation is documented by the carrier’s own equipment. When the driver did stop and did look, and the load still came loose, the question moves upstream to whoever loaded and secured it in the first place.

Why the Shipper Is Often a Defendant

A great deal of freight is loaded and secured by the shipper, not the driver — a mill that stacks and straps its own lumber, a steel service center that loads coils with its own crane crew, a feedlot that loads cattle, an equipment dealer that chains a skid steer to a trailer. The driver arrives, signs for a sealed or pre-secured load, and drives. Federal law places the duty of securement on the carrier and driver, but tort law places a duty of reasonable care on anyone whose work creates a foreseeable hazard on the highway, and Nebraska courts apply ordinary negligence principles to a shipper that loads a trailer in a way that makes it dangerous to everyone around it. The shipper’s loading crew, its written loading procedures, its training records and its history of prior load-shift incidents are all discoverable, and they are frequently where the real negligence lives. A carrier with a thin policy and a shipper with a deep one is a common combination, and a case that names only the carrier leaves the deeper policy untouched.

There is a second reason to look at the shipper: weight. An overloaded trailer or an axle group over its rated limit changes braking distance, handling and the loads on every tiedown. Weigh tickets, bills of lading and scale records establish what the truck actually weighed, and a truck that was over gross or over axle when it left the dock was in violation before the driver turned the key.

Tankers, Livestock and the Loads That Move on Their Own

Two categories of cargo cannot be tied down, and they produce some of the worst crashes on Nebraska roads. Liquid in a partially filled tanker surges forward on braking and sideways in a turn, and a partial load is more dangerous than a full one because the liquid has room to move. Baffled and compartmented tanks exist precisely to limit surge, and a carrier that dispatched a partially loaded smooth-bore tank on a route with tight ramps made a choice. Livestock is the other. Cattle and hogs shift their weight in response to the truck’s motion, and a trailer loaded without regard to the animals’ distribution — too many head in one compartment, gates not secured, a load that was legal by weight but wrong by balance — will roll at speeds a dry van would take without incident. Livestock haulers operate under their own set of federal expectations and industry loading guidelines, and I have handled enough central Nebraska cases involving cattle trailers to know that the loading plan is where those cases are won.

Flatbeds, Vans and the Loads Nobody Can See

Open-deck trailers get most of the attention in securement cases because the failure is visible: the straps are on the outside and the load is on the road. But enclosed van trailers produce their own version of the crash, and it is harder to prove. Freight inside a dry van that was not blocked or braced shifts on braking, and a pallet stack that slides forward changes the trailer’s balance and the tractor’s handling without anyone outside seeing why the rig suddenly could not stop or stay in its lane. The rules do not distinguish: cargo inside a van must be immobilized against the same forward, rearward and lateral forces as cargo on a flatbed. In a van case, the evidence is the interior of the trailer after the crash — the position of the freight, the marks on the walls and floor, the absence of load bars, straps or airbags — and it is evidence that disappears the moment the trailer is unloaded. Photographing the inside of a trailer before the salvage crew opens it is one of the first things I ask for.

What a Lost Load Does to the Car Behind It

Debris crashes are their own category of injury. A pallet, a coil, a piece of equipment or a section of pipe on an interstate at night is an obstacle no following driver can reasonably avoid, and the collision that results is either a direct strike at highway speed or a loss of control in the swerve. Carriers defend these cases by arguing the following driver should have seen and avoided the object, and Nebraska’s comparative fault rules, which reduce recovery by the injured person’s share and bar it at fifty percent, make that argument worth a great deal of money to them. The rebuttal is the physics: the size and color of the object, the lighting, the sight distance, the following driver’s speed and reaction time, and above all the fact that the object was on the road because a federal securement standard was violated. A jury that understands the object should never have been there does not spend long on whether the car behind it reacted perfectly.

The Evidence, and Where It Goes

Securement evidence is physical and it disappears fast. The straps, chains, binders, anchor points and dunnage are thrown away or reused. The trailer is repaired. The load is salvaged. The shipper’s loading dock camera overwrites on a short cycle. The preservation letter in a cargo case has to name all of it — every tiedown and its rating tag, the trailer’s anchor points and their condition, the bill of lading, the weigh tickets, the shipper’s loading procedure and the dock video — and it has to go to the shipper as well as the carrier, because the shipper is not thinking about litigation the week of the crash. My evidence preservation page covers the carrier side of the letter in detail. The cargo case adds the shipper, and adds a reconstruction expert who can read the failed tiedowns and the load marks on the deck and say, with numbers, why it came loose.

Nebraska’s Version of the Rule

Nebraska has adopted Part 393 by statute, which means the securement rules govern intrastate trucks — the grain truck that never leaves the county, the local flatbed, the livestock trailer running from the sale barn to the feedlot — and not only the interstate carriers. The statute carves out certain fertilizer and agricultural-chemical application equipment moving in small units, and a handful of other narrow exceptions, but the general securement duties and the commodity-specific rules apply to Nebraska trucking as state law. That matters because a violation of a safety statute is evidence of negligence in a Nebraska courtroom, and the carrier that argues its local operation was exempt from the federal rulebook is usually wrong.

How I Handle a Cargo Case

The first week is preservation and photographs: the trailer, the deck, every tiedown, the load and where it ended up, the road marks and the debris field, before any of it is cleaned up. The second is the paper: the bill of lading, the shipper’s loading records, the carrier’s securement training, the driver’s ELD and inspection entries, the weigh tickets. Then an expert reads all of it against Part 393 and says what failed and why. By the time the carrier’s insurer explains that the load shifted unexpectedly, I can usually show which regulation predicted exactly that. If a shifted, lost or rolled load hurt you or someone in your family anywhere in Nebraska or western Iowa, call (402) 378-9208. The consultation is free, there is no fee unless I recover for you, and the tiedowns are being thrown away while you decide.

Your Attorney

Frank Younes

Every page on this site is written by Frank Younes, a Nebraska trial attorney with a published record of verdicts and settlements, selection to the National Trial Lawyers Top 100, and a practice that covers every county in Nebraska and Iowa. No case is handed to an associate — the lawyer you read here is the lawyer who works your case.

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Frequently Asked Questions

The straps looked fine. Can the securement still have been illegal?

Yes. The rules set a minimum number of tiedowns, a minimum combined rated capacity of half the cargo weight, edge protection, tension and anchor-point requirements, and commodity-specific geometry. A load with the right number of straps in the wrong places, or on worn anchor points, violates the standard.

The driver said the shipper loaded it. Does that let the carrier off?

No. Federal rules place the securement duty on the carrier and driver regardless of who loaded the trailer, and the driver must inspect within the first fifty miles. The shipper can be liable too — alongside the carrier, not instead of it.

A piece of cargo fell off a truck and I hit it. The trucking company says I should have avoided it.

That is the standard defense, and it is beatable. Sight distance, lighting, the object’s size and your reaction time are all measurable, and the object was on the road because a securement rule was broken. Nebraska’s comparative fault rules reduce, not eliminate, recovery unless you were half or more at fault.

Do these rules apply to a grain truck or cattle trailer that never leaves Nebraska?

Yes. Nebraska adopted Part 393 by statute, so the securement rules govern intrastate trucks as state law, with narrow exceptions for certain agricultural application equipment.

What is the fifty-mile rule?

A driver must inspect the cargo and securement within the first fifty miles of a trip and again at every change of duty status or every three hours or 150 miles. Electronic logs show whether those stops happened.

How fast does the evidence in a cargo case disappear?

Days. Tiedowns are discarded or reused, trailers repaired, loads salvaged and dock video overwritten. A preservation letter to both the carrier and the shipper the week of the crash is what keeps it.