A portion of Interstate 65 had to be closed for several hours recently. A devastating car accident occurred in an area of the highway that is under construction. According to troopers with the Kentucky State Police, six people lost their lives.
Reports from one trooper indicate that traffic in the construction zone had come to a halt in a place where three lanes merged down to two at approximately 10:30 p.m. on that Thursday night. In the right lane, a semitruck was stopped with two passenger vehicles behind it. A second semitruck came upon the line of stopped vehicles, but failed to stop.
It rammed into the back of one of the vehicles, which began a chain reaction crash that ended with one of the passenger vehicles underneath the first semitruck. Five people from one of the passenger vehicles suffered fatal injuries, along with the driver of the other passenger vehicle. A child in the first passenger vehicle survived and was taken to an area hospital. The northbound side of the interstate where the accident occurred did not reopen until around 5 a.m. on Friday morning.
Kentucky State Police did not indicate whether charges were contemplated against the truck driver, but that does not preclude the families of the victims and the injured from filing civil actions against the driver and employer. The employer may be found legally liable under the legal theory of respondeat superior, which allows restitution from an employer if the employee was negligent while in the performance of his or her duties at the time of the crash. This may provide the victims and their families with a source of restitution in the aftermath of this devastating car accident.
Source: Fox News, “6 dead in Interstate 65 chain reaction crash in Kentucky“, July 14, 2017
