Photo 5: Examining the skid marks due to
accident.
Photo 6: Guardrail damaged due to run off
vehicle.
Photo 7: Damaged vehicles involved in road
accidents.
caused by passing vehicles or previous accidents.
They may also have been caused during removal
or dragging of the damaged vehicles by tow trucks
and may not have any connection with the accident
under investigation. Therefore, the investigator
should take measurements of things as early as
possible before these marks are removed, lost or
destroyed.
Existing road furniture and roadside objects,
e.g. sign posts, trees, utility poles, guardrails, bridge
parts etc., may be gouged, bent, scratched, have
paint scrapings or other indications of damage
caused by a vehicle. By relating these types of
damage to that suffered by a vehicle, the vehicle’s
initial direction of travel and its path at the time of
collision and post-collision can be established.
Inspections of Vehicles Involved
Details of the damage suffered by a vehicle, apart
from assisting in the determination of how and why
an accident occurred, are important for various
other purposes. By matching or relating damage
suffered by a vehicle and the things it struck,
including the road surface, a vehicle’s direction of
travel, placement on the highway, point of collision
and path followed both before and after collision
may be determined. Therefore, these details must
be properly assessed and accurately recorded.
The investigator should look for vehicle damage
and marks such as;
● ●
dents and structural damage,
● ●
paint scrapings or rub-offs,
● ●
abrasions,
● ●
scratches,
● ●
striation marks, and
● ●
tyre imprints.
In the process of reconstructing a road
accident, it is important to determine the vehicle’s
velocity at the very beginning of the bodywork
deformation process. It can be calculated by
the amount of damage incurred and the energy
required for the vehicle deformation to take place
during the impact.
The size of such a deformation depends on the
impact velocity, stiffness of the vehicle structure
at the place where it came into contact with the
obstacle, and characteristics of the obstacle.
A special software is available to simplify the
calculation work carried out by an accident
investigator.
13