At The Arndt Law Firm, we understand how complex truck accident cases can be in Myrtle Beach and across Horry County. Our team collaborates closely, leveraging our expertise in commercial vehicle regulations, insurance, and litigation to assist those impacted by serious collisions.
From the beginning, we prioritize working hand-in-hand with our clients. We navigate the intricate web of state and federal rules that may apply to their cases because the distinction between local and interstate trucks can significantly affect the outcome.
Countless trucks operate on South Carolina's roads without leaving the state, and specific laws and safety standards govern these incidents. Our commitment lies in identifying the applicable rules, preserving crucial evidence, and holding the responsible parties accountable, whether the driver is a direct employee or an owner-operator.
We manage every aspect of the claims process, allowing our clients to concentrate on their recovery. Working together, we strive to make the process as clear, responsive, and straightforward as possible.
If you or a loved one has sustained injuries in a truck accident in Myrtle Beach or the surrounding region, reach out to our team today for a free consultation. Let us put our collective experience to work for you.
The first step is to determine whether the Federal Rules apply, and this step is often overlooked. According to 49 CFR 390.5, a commercial motor vehicle is defined as a self-propelled or towed vehicle used on a highway in interstate commerce for transporting passengers or property when it meets at least one of four specific triggers.
These triggers include:
By identifying these aspects, our team can further assess your case and implement the best legal strategy moving forward.
Do federal trucking rules apply to every commercial truck?
No. They attach to vehicles used in interstate commerce that meet a weight, passenger count, or hazardous materials trigger. A truck that never crosses the state line can still be in interstate commerce if its load started or will end outside South Carolina.
This is the question most truck pages skip entirely, and the answer is not that nothing applies.
South Carolina sets its own driving limits for intrastate motor carrier drivers at Section 56-5-90. The section restricts how long an intrastate driver may drive following consecutive hours off duty, how long after having been on duty, and how many hours may be driven across seven and eight consecutive day periods, with the driver's status determined by the previous seven days of operation.
That matters for two reasons. It means a fatigue theory remains available against a purely intrastate carrier, argued against a state standard rather than a federal one. And it means the absence of federal electronic logging data is not the end of the inquiry, because the state limits still define what was permissible.
What replaces the federal documentary structure in that situation is ordinary evidence: dispatch records, delivery schedules, fuel and toll receipts, phone records, witness accounts, and whatever the company kept for its own purposes. Those are obtained through preservation demands and discovery rather than found in a regulatory file.
Section 56-5-90(A) sets the following driving limits for intrastate motor carrier drivers in South Carolina:
Subsection (B) provides that a driver’s status is determined by the previous 7 days of operation.
A truck claim usually has more than one defendant, and finding them separates a policy limits case from a full recovery.
A carrier often cannot avoid responsibility by calling a leased driver an independent contractor. Federal leasing rules give the carrier exclusive control of leased equipment, and courts look at that control when deciding who answers for the driver. Whether the carrier is liable for the driver depends on the lease terms, state agency law, and the facts of the particular case.
Beyond the carrier, other parties appear depending on the facts. The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in 2026 that a broker can be sued for carelessly choosing an unsafe carrier. Likewise, a shipper who loaded the truck, a maintenance contractor whose work failed, the manufacturer of a failed component, and the owner of a trailer operated by someone else can each carry independent responsibility and separate insurance.
Where a road defect or work zone configuration contributed, a government body or its contractor may be involved, bringing the Tort Claims Act's shorter deadline and damage caps into a case that otherwise has none.
Driver fatigue is a recurring cause of serious commercial vehicle collisions, and it is unusually provable because both the federal and the state schemes limit driving time. Violating a safety statute or regulation, such as the hours-of-service rules, can support a claim of negligence per se.
Where the federal rules apply, electronic logging data records driving time and duty status. Read against dispatch records, bills of lading, delivery windows, and fuel or toll receipts, it shows not only what a driver logged but whether the schedule the carrier set could be met within the limits at all. A delivery window requiring more driving hours than the rules permit is a fact about the carrier rather than the driver.
That distinction opens a claim against the company on its own conduct rather than solely on responsibility for its driver. Negligent hiring, inadequate training, insufficient supervision, and scheduling that pressures a driver past the limits are separate theories, and they are the theories that reach a carrier's larger policies.
The driver qualification file supports the same analysis, containing licensing, medical certification, and employment history, with gaps speaking to what the carrier knew or should have checked.
Can the trucking company be liable for more than its driver's mistake?
Yes. Negligent hiring, training, supervision, and scheduling are claims against the carrier's own conduct rather than derivative of the driver's, and they are frequently established from the same records the rules require it to keep.
The South Carolina Department of Public Safety recorded 348 people killed on Horry County roads across the five federal fiscal years ending September 30, 2024, along with 1,028 people seriously injured and 54,154 collisions in total.
That figure covers all vehicle types rather than commercial trucks specifically, and it is presented that way rather than narrowed by inference. The agency publishes a large truck breakdown in the same county file.
What the figures establish is the ratio driving truck litigation everywhere. Collisions between a heavy vehicle and a passenger vehicle concentrate injuries in the smaller one, and a claim arising from that mismatch will regularly exceed the coverage available on an ordinary auto policy, which is why identifying every responsible party matters more here than almost anywhere.
Horry County has more responding agencies along one corridor than most South Carolina markets, and a request sent to the wrong one returns nothing.
Myrtle Beach Police Department investigates within the city limits of Myrtle Beach. North Myrtle Beach Police Department covers that city. The South Carolina Highway Patrol covers the highways and unincorporated areas, and the Horry County Police Department also operates in the unincorporated county. The SC State Transport Police is the primary commercial-vehicle enforcement agency statewide. Horry County Fire Rescue responds countywide and generates run reports, and the Horry County Coroner's Office maintains a separate file for each fatality.
Under Section 56-5-1290, the reports drivers and owners must file are not admissible at trial as evidence of negligence or due care, and officers may refer to them only to refresh recollection. The report starts the investigation rather than resolving it, a principle that runs through every Myrtle Beach crash claim.
Truck crashes frequently involve people on the job, and that changes the structure of the claim rather than its merits.
Section 42-1-540 provides that the rights and remedies under the workers' compensation title exclude all other rights and remedies against the employer, at common law or otherwise. The obvious defendant is often unavailable no matter how clearly the employer was at fault.
The same section carries a carve-out regularly omitted. The limitation does not apply to injuries resulting from acts of a subcontractor of the employer, and it does not bar an action by an employee of one subcontractor against another subcontractor where a common employer hired both. On a delivery operation with layered contractors, that language is often the difference between a barred claim and a live one. In addition, an upstream contractor may also be immune under the statutory-employer doctrine (S.C. Code § 42-1-400 et seq.).
The third-party claim carries its own deadline, shorter than the general one. Under Section 42-1-560, it must be commenced within one year after the compensation carrier accepts liability or makes payment, after which the right of action passes to the carrier by statutory assignment following written notice and twenty days.
| Party | Basis for responsibility | Records that establish it |
|---|---|---|
| Driver | Direct negligence | Collision report, logs, citations |
| Motor carrier | Responsible for its drivers, including owner-operators | Qualification file, dispatch, training |
| Broker or shipper | Arranging or loading the load | Bills of lading, load instructions |
| Maintenance contractor | Failed repair or inspection | Service records, inspection history |
| Component manufacturer | Defective part | The preserved part itself |
This is the practical advantage of a regulated defendant, and it has a short shelf life.
Where the federal rules apply, electronic logging data shows hours of service and driving time, and the driver qualification file shows licensing, medical certification, and employment history. Maintenance and inspection records show what was known about the vehicle. Dispatch records, bills of lading, and communication logs show the schedule the driver was working to. Where a vehicle carried cameras or an event data recorder, that data is often the clearest account of the seconds before impact.
Every one of those sits on a retention schedule, and some are measured in months rather than years. Vehicle event data can be overwritten far sooner, and a tractor returned to service, or a trailer released to another carrier, takes its data with it.
Where the federal rules do not apply because the vehicle operated only within the state, some of this documentary structure may not exist at all. What remains is the company's own paperwork: dispatch, delivery schedules, fuel and toll receipts, maintenance invoices, and driver payment records that can establish hours worked even without a log.
A written preservation letter sent early converts a routine deletion into a decision the carrier has to justify, and it is usually the first substantive step in a serious case.
How quickly do commercial vehicle records disappear?
Some retention periods run in months, and vehicle event data can be overwritten far sooner. A written preservation demand sent early is what protects records that would otherwise be deleted in the ordinary course.
An injured person recovers as long as their share of the fault is 50 percent or less when compared with all defendants combined, with the award reduced by that percentage and barred at 51 percent, under Nelson v. Concrete Supply Co. That rule comes from a court decision rather than a statute.
A second rule governs how much each defendant pays and does real work in a multi-party truck case. Under Section 15-38-15, joint and several liability does not apply to a defendant whose conduct is determined to be less than fifty percent of the total fault, unless that defendant’s conduct was willful, wanton, reckless, or intentional, or involved illegal drug use (and, for causes of action accruing before 2026, gross negligence or alcohol).
In those situations, the defendant can still be held responsible for the whole award. Otherwise, a defendant below the fifty percent line pays only its own percentage; above it, the defendant can be held responsible for the entire award.
For causes of action accruing on or after January 1, 2026, a defendant may also ask that a party who was never sued be placed on the verdict form and assigned a share, disclosed within one hundred eighty days, with the defendant carrying the burden of proving that the added party's breach was a proximate cause unless the plaintiff amends to add them.
In a case with a carrier, a broker, a shipper, and a maintenance contractor, that is a live strategic threat. A claim built around the carrier alone can lose a substantial share of its value to parties nobody investigated.
A fatal truck collision produces two claims under South Carolina law. The wrongful death action compensates the statutory beneficiaries, and the survival action carries forward what the person suffered before death, with proceeds paid to the estate where creditors can reach them.
The claim must be brought by the personal representative, so a probate appointment precedes any filing. The deadline for a wrongful death claim is three years from the date of death. The deadline for a survival claim is generally three years from the injury, though a separate statute may extend it. Settlement of either requires court approval. The wrongful death analysis covers that sequence.
South Carolina places no general statutory cap on non-economic damages in an ordinary injury case, so pain, disfigurement, and loss of enjoyment are not limited by statute.
Punitive damages require clear and convincing evidence of wilful, wanton, or reckless conduct. They are generally capped at the greater of three times compensatory damages or $500,000, rising to four times compensatory damages or $2 million in certain listed situations. There is no cap where the defendant intended harm, was convicted of a felony for the same conduct, or was substantially impaired by alcohol or drugs. The dollar figures are adjusted annually for inflation.
On coverage, a regulated interstate carrier generally carries limits well above the South Carolina auto minimum of $25,000 per person and $50,000 per accident. That coverage is frequently layered, with excess sitting above an underlying policy. Where the vehicle falls outside the federal scheme, that assumption may not hold, and a claimant's own uninsured and underinsured motorist coverage becomes correspondingly more important.
The general deadline is three years (S.C. Code § 15-3-530(5)). Different timing rules can apply to injured children; confirm the deadline with counsel. For wrongful death, the deadline is also three years, measured from the date of death. A claim against a government entity must be filed within two years, or three years if a verified claim is filed with the agency within one year of the loss.
Recovery is capped at $300,000 per person and $600,000 per occurrence, with no punitive damages. An injured worker should sue the at-fault third party within one year after the comp carrier accepts the claim. After that, the carrier can take over the claim by giving written notice.
Suit is filed in the Court of Common Pleas for Horry County, in the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit, at the courthouse at 1301 Second Avenue in Conway, with the Clerk of Court at (843) 915-5080 and a second office at 9630 Scipio Lane in Myrtle Beach at (843) 915-5082.
Seriously injured people are often taken to Grand Strand Medical Center (809 82nd Pkwy, Myrtle Beach), the area’s Level I adult trauma center. Conway Medical Center is a Level III trauma center.
Federal guidance states that a motor carrier cannot transfer compliance responsibility to an owner-operator, and that the term employee includes an independent contractor employed by a carrier.
South Carolina sets its own driving limits for intrastate motor carrier drivers, so a fatigue theory remains available even where the federal rules do not attach.
10,001 pounds by rating or actual weight, whichever is greater, when used in interstate commerce. A separate and higher 26,001-pound threshold governs commercial driver licensing.
Three years from the crash, with shorter deadlines for government defendants and workers' compensation third-party claims.
Nothing up front. Consultations are free, and the fee is contingent on recovery.
The Arndt Law Firm begins a commercial vehicle claim by answering the threshold question, because whether the federal rules attach determines what records exist before it determines anything else. Where a truck operated only within the state, the analysis shifts to South Carolina's own limits for intrastate drivers rather than stopping.
The inquiry then widens from the driver to every party with a role in the load, the vehicle, and the schedule, since a defendant found less than fifty percent at fault pays only its own share, and a party nobody sued can still be given a percentage on the verdict form. Horry County claims are filed in the Court of Common Pleas in Conway. Attorney Jonathan S. Arndt has been licensed in South Carolina since 2018 and reviews the firm's commercial vehicle matters.
An initial assessment carries no charge and no fee arises without a recovery. You can reach the firm through the contact page. Electronic logs and vehicle event data are held on retention schedules measured in months, and in some cases far less.
Last reviewed: August 2026
This page was reviewed by Jonathan S. Arndt, licensed in South Carolina since 2018.
Content is provided for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Consult a licensed South Carolina attorney for guidance specific to your situation.
