-=> Quoting Tom Rightmer to Amy King <=-
 AK> I know if you are going too fast, you can hit a car and send it quite
 AK> a ways forward.  The police might take excessive speed and the size of
 AK> the car that started the chain reaction into account, but in Oklahoma,
 AK> even if you are stopped behind a car at an intersection, if you hit the
 AK> first car at the intersection because you were hit from behind by a
 AK> moving vehicle, you are still held accountable for the damages to the
 AK> first car.
 TR> 
 TR> Amy, I have to disagree with you, at least for Oklahoma. I've worked
 TR> around 5,000 vehicle accidents and have taught traffic in Oklahoma Law
 TR> Enforcement Academies. If you have two cars stopped at a red light and
 TR> a third car strikes the rear vehicle hard enough to knock it forward
 TR> into the first vehicle, the one who started the chain reaction gets the
 TR> ticket. The driver of the middle vehicle would have no chance to avoid
 TR> the accident with the front vehicle and would not be disobeying any
 TR> law. If the insurance companies settled the accident as you suggest,
 TR> they would be cheating the policy holder. If the officer wrote a ticket
 TR> to the middle vehicle, it would be without merit and dismissed. In
 TR> short, there would be no tactic available to the middle vehicle to
 TR> avoid hitting the front vehicle. Excessive speed from the vehicle
 TR> starting the chain-reaction would not be necessary, as moderately low
 TR> speeds can knock a stopped vehicle forward a considerable distance. If
 TR> this happened to you in Oklahoma, you were cheated, both by the police
 TR> and the insurance company.
That's not what happened in my husband's accident.  All the other cars, but
his, were stopped at the interection.  He only had to pay for the damages of
the car he hit.  He got a ticket for following too close to the car he hit.
Each of the other drivers apparently got tickets for following too close.
Apparently, each of the other drivers didn't leave enough space between his 
r
her car and the car in front.  My mother always told me that if you are
stopped behind a car, you need to be able to see the back tires of that car.
If you can't, you are too close.
My husband says that if the insurance wasn't handled the way it was handled
druing his accident, one insurance company would have taken a heavy, 
inancial
blow.  The company would have wanted to recover its losses, so it might have
raised all the rates of all its policy holders to do so.
Then everyone would suffer.
Amy King
... Backup not found: (A)bort (R)etry (S)lap nearest innocent bystander.
--- Blue Wave/Max v2.30
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