Karla Orrantina, Felipe Armenta-Cardena, Latrinda Pope Injured in Loose Truck Wheel Accident in Kansas City, KS
Kansas City, KS -- January 20, 2023, Karla Orrantina, Felipe Armenta-Cardena, and Latrinda Pope were injured in an accident where a loose truck wheel hit their vehicles.
Preliminary reports from the Kansas Highway Patrol said that the incident happened at approximately 6:25 a.m. along I-35 near South 7th Street/US Highway 169.
Details say that traffic was moving northbound along I-35. While it did so, a Kenworth semi-truck somehow lost two of its wheels. They bounced into several vehicles before then flying off-road and hitting a building.
Police identified three drivers having "suspected minor" injuries. They were Karla Orrantina, Felipe Armenta-Cardena, and Latrinda Pope. Right now, additional details about the crash are unavailable.
To put this rather bluntly, wheels flying off a truck is almost always the result of someone making a mistake. Maybe there was an obvious issue the truck driver missed in their pre-trip check (if they did one). Maybe their employer makes them drive vehicles in a state of serious disrepair. Did the axle itself break off? Were the lug nuts not properly secured?
I know it can seem a bit crass to jump to the conclusions that the truck driver or their employer is to blame. Could this be some one-in-a-million, unpredictable, freak occurrence? Sure, but one-in-a-million is being pretty generous. Like I said, investigations almost always show a serious mistake led to a catastrophic failure. Not only do the affected victims deserve some answers, but there may be behaviors which led to this incident that could still be putting the public at risk. Shouldn't steps be taken to ensure no one else gets hurt?
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