A crash, a fall, or a collapse happens in seconds. What caused it — and who is responsible — has to be rebuilt from physical evidence, recovered data, and physics that do not bend to a preferred narrative.
Start a conversation with our AI Research Concierge, already scoped to accident reconstruction. Select a specialization to prompt it, or describe your situation directly.
Accident reconstruction turns a scene that no longer exists into a defensible account of speed, sequence, and cause. The physical evidence involved differs enormously by incident type — a wire rope failure leaves fractography, a vehicle leaves crush profiles and event-data-recorder timelines, a fall leaves a coefficient-of-friction reading that starts degrading the moment the floor is refinished — but the discipline is the same: measure what remains, model what physics allows, and rule out the explanations the evidence does not support. This department covers the incident types where that reconstruction routinely decides a lawsuit, a citation, or a subrogation claim: vehicle collisions, pedestrian incidents, cranes and heavy equipment, industrial plants, rail and aviation, and slips and falls.
Each specialization area covers a distinct incident type with its own physics, evidence sources, and governing standards. Start with the one that matches your incident.
Tip-overs, rigging failures, and structural collapse in cranes and heavy equipment.
investigateMachine guarding, lockout/tagout, and process failures behind plant-floor injuries.
investigateVehicle-pedestrian crash dynamics — visibility, trajectory, and injury causation.
investigateDerailments, grade-crossing collisions, and aircraft accidents — data recorder and wreckage analysis.
investigateFloor friction, walkway defects, and stairway conditions behind falls and premises claims.
investigateMomentum-based crash reconstruction, EDR data, and vehicle dynamics for collision litigation.
investigateAccident reconstruction is only as strong as the evidence it is built on. Every investigation in this department starts with the same discipline: document before anything moves, recover the data before it is overwritten, and let the physics constrain the narrative.
Technical briefings and case analyses on crashes, collapses, and falls — written by the people who reconstruct them.
How severely a vehicle was struck and how an occupant was loaded are different questions with different evidence. Restraint hardware answers the second better than any severity number.
readTwo speed methods with almost no shared inputs. When they converge the result is strong; when they diverge, the divergence is usually telling you something about the collision.
readAn EDR is a restraint controller with a short memory, not a flight recorder. What it measured, what it derived, and what it never saw are three different things.
readThe spill is mopped in an hour, the shoes go back in a closet, the video overwrites in weeks and the floor is refinished by spring. What preservation actually has to cover.
readA trip is not a slip. Riser uniformity, nosings, handrail continuity and quarter-inch elevation changes are measurable long after any contaminant is gone, and they follow different rules.
readA floor does not have a coefficient of friction the way it has a thickness. It has whatever an instrument reported, under one contaminant, with one test foot, on one day.
readAs soon as possible, and ideally before the scene is cleared, the equipment is repaired, or the data is overwritten. Skid marks fade within days, event-data-recorder memory can be overwritten by a later trip or a jump-start, and a scene that is not documented within days is often unrecoverable. Early involvement rarely costs more and frequently prevents evidence loss that cannot be undone later.
Reconstruction establishes what physically happened — speed, position, sequence, timing — from evidence and physics. Root-cause failure analysis asks why a component or system failed at the metallurgical, mechanical, or design level. Many cases need both: reconstruction to establish the sequence of events, and failure analysis to explain why a part broke, a guard did not stop the injury, or a brake did not hold. We coordinate the two rather than treating them as separate engagements.
It depends on the incident, but the pattern is consistent: anything that changes with time or handling should be treated as perishable. That includes scene marks and debris, the vehicle or equipment in its as-found condition, any electronic data logger or recorder, and the specific surface, rigging, or component involved. A short preservation call before anything is moved, cleaned, or repaired is usually the highest-value hour in the entire case.
It depends on the incident type. Vehicle work commonly references SAE recommended practices and NHTSA/FMVSS data; crane work references ASME B30 and OSHA 1926 Subpart CC; industrial work references OSHA 1910 and ANSI B11; rail and aviation work follow FRA, FAA, and NTSB investigative frameworks; and premises falls reference ANSI/ASTM walkway-safety standards and applicable building codes. Which standard controls is itself often a contested question in litigation.
Describe the incident. We will scope it and connect you with the right expert — usually within one business day.