Troopers Recreate Car Wreck Scenes

Brooks Schuelke

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Yesterday's Tyler Morning Telegraph from Tyler, Texas had an interesting story about how DPS Troopers conduct investigations so that they can do accident reconstruction work following a car wreck or trucking accident. Accident reconstruction work used to be done by hand --- from the measuring with tape measures to the calculations. Now, technology is making it easier to collect the data and come up with more accurate findings. The article details how the DPS has embraced this technology to do their accident reconstruction work.

Accident reconstruction work is often critical in determining what happened in a car wreck. By using data from skid marks, the damage to the vehicles, the distance that the vehicles traveled after impact, etc, reconstruction experts can often get a pretty good idea about what happened in a wreck. This type of testimony can be critical in determining how accidents occurred when there is a dispute over how a wreck happened.

Unfortunately, this type of expert testimony is subject to the same criticism as other experts. Unscrupulous experts can often get the results they want by making various assumptions that may or may not be supported by the facts of the case. It's up to us, the lawyers, to point those problems out.

For more information on this subject, please refer to the section on Car and Motorcycle Accidents.