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.)