When an 18-wheel truck and a family van collided on a Texas highway, ten people were killed in the crash. Reporters from The Dallas Morning News began investigating the incident and found that more than 5,000 Americans die each year in accidents involving commercial trucks. After a 14-month investigation, the reporters found the deregulation of interstate shipping in the 1980s had lead to a number of concerns: a proliferation of companies moving in and out of the industry, the use of felons and drivers whose backgrounds were not thoroughly checked, and a shortage of inspectors to enforce standards and take unsafe carriers of the road.

>> Watch a preview of EXPOSÉ’s “Eyes on the Road” online.

>> EXPOSÉ’s “Eyes on the Road” has its broadcast premiere this weekend. Check local listings. Check back here Monday for the full episode online.

>> Read the original reports in The Dallas Morning News.

The EXPOSÉ: America’s Investigative Reports series is produced by Thirteen/WNET New York in association with CIR.

Creative Commons License

Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.

Carrie Ching is an award-winning, independent multimedia journalist and producer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. For six years, she led digital storytelling projects at the Center for Investigative Reporting as senior multimedia producer. Her multimedia reports have been featured by NPR.org, The Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Grist, Time.com, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, KQED, PBS NewsHour, Salon.com, Mother Jones, Public Radio International, Poynter, Columbia Journalism Review and many other publications. Her specialty is crafting digital narratives and exploring ways to use video, audio, photography, animation and interactive graphics to push the boundaries of storytelling on the Web, tablets and mobile. Her work has been honored with awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Best of the West, the Online News Association, Scripps Howard, The Gracies, and was part of the entry in a Pulitzer-finalist project. Prior to her time at CIR she was a magazine and book editor, video journalist, newspaper reporter and TV comedy scriptwriter. She was on the 2010 Eddie Adams Workshop faculty as a multimedia producer working with MediaStorm to teach digital storytelling techniques to photojournalists. She completed a master’s degree in journalism at UC Berkeley in 2005.