[Bill Rose]

Man, thats a lousy way to wrap up the weekend. It's hard to to figure how someone could walk away from that truck. It's good to know that the safety equipment on the truck, did what it's designed to do. Many of us haul these cars/trailers down highways at 70+ mph for hours on end, and never think something like this is will happen to us.

We always stop at rest stops and check out the trailers/hitches/safety chains, etc, and also check the car and straps inside the trailers. I would be very interested in how this happened, and how it might be avoided in the future, for those of us who do this through the show car season. I'd also like to see the trailer ball, if thats at all possible. That is the one part of the hitching system, that I usually don't think about failing.

This looks like a violent crash that happened in a split second. Someone was stopped up ahead, and he tried to swerve to miss them. Why would the ball snap? Did it snap because he couldn't slow down fast enough and the truck jack-knifed, causing the hitch and/or ball to be torn apart? Is/was the broken off ball still latched up inside the trailer coupler, after the crash? Were the trailer brakes working properly? Did the safety chains stay intact? Did the cable for the trailer brakes pull out like it should have, and slow the trailer ..... or did the ball snap, and that caused the crash? Maybe this will never be determined, but it might be helpful to know, so others can take the necessary steps to hopefully avoid this carnage in the future, so some good can come from this disaster.