After a serious auto accident, law enforcement or an outside agency may do a reconstruction of the accident scene. The process seeks to discover exactly what occurred before, during and after the incident.
Accident reconstruction can help you to learn about liability and fault in the situation. However, whoever does it, must do so correctly. The Expert Institute explains accident reconstruction is a type of science.
Professional field
The process is causation forensics. It uses various scientific methods to make determinations about the crash. They also use mathematics and engineering principles. It is a highly professional field in which experts must have training in the specific process.
Determinations
Through accident reconstruction, experts can find out everything from factors impacting the situation to how well you and the other driver could see at various points prior to the crash.
Validity
To properly reconstruct a scene, experts will need access to as much information as possible. They will want to see the vehicles and the scene. They will need to understand the conditions, including weather and traffic. The outcome of the reconstruction will be the best with more information, which can come from photographs, videos and seeing the physical elements in person.
Once experts have the information needed, they can conduct tests and reconfigure the scene. They can then use deductive reasoning skills to recreate what happened based on science, math and the evidence.
When reconstructing a crash, experts can often determine how fast you were each going, the original positions of each vehicle, the impact area of the crash and various other factors that can assist law enforcement with issuing a final ruling on the cause and fault.