Insurance aftermath of Friday’s pile-up may take months to sort out

Those with simple compulsory policies may be left to their own devices when it comes to paying for their repairs. A comprehensive kasko insurance policy will save Mikko Puurula’s Audi

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By Esa Juntunen
     
      New door panels, and this here Audi will be good to go.
      Mikko Puurula’s car was damaged when he was caught in the middle of last Friday’s pile-up carnage on the Lahdenväylä motorway.
      “It does not have any sentimental value for me. It is just a car, an object, but if it can be fixed up that will save me from looking for a new one”, the motorist observes in the yard of the Audi Center bodyshop in Vantaa.
      In this case a comprehensive insurance policy [known hereabouts as 'kasko' insurance after the Spanish word casco for "hull", "body", or even "helmet"] will cover the repair costs.
     
Puurula’s story is likely to be one of the first cases with a happy ending in the aftermath of Friday’s massive shunt.
      The numerous cars standing forlornly around it with their mangled front and rear ends tell their own depressing tale of what went down on Highway 4 in the space of a few short hours last Friday.
      The Helsinki and Eastern Uusimaa Police Departments estimate that at least three people still remain in a serious condition in hospital.
      One of them was actually run over by a car coming from behind after he had exited his car on Lahdenväylä. The Helsinki Police Department are still hoping for eyewitness accounts regarding that incident.
      In addition, the police have already issued a couple of dozen official warnings regarding Friday’s multiple collisions, which involved at least a hundred vehicles in total.
      Thus far no decision has been made with regard to issuing possible fines.
     
The insurance companies reckon that it will take months to process the whole incident. The pile-up chaos resulted in a flood of insurance claims.
      “On Monday there was another day of difficult road conditions in Helsinki, and this is likely to have resulted in further accidents. In the course of this week we will begin to get the total picture”, says Maarit Lepistö, Head of Motor Claims Finland at If P&C Insurance.
      "The average paid compensation may be anything from a couple of hundred to a couple of thousand euros, and in some cases, where an expensive car is written off, it will be the price of the vehicle.”
     
The compulsory traffic insurance covers the cost if the driver of the vehicle causes damage to another car.
      But in a pile-up - especially something on this near-biblical scale - working out precisely who the guilty parties are is a very laboursome exercise, and sometimes no satisfactory answer can be reached.
      The law as it stands says that if your car runs into the back of another vehicle, you are the guilty party, but just for the sake of an example, what is one to make of a case (and there are doubtless dozens of them) in which a driver actually manages to stop his car in time, but the stationary - and very vulnerable - vehicle is then unceremoniously rammed from behind, pushing it into the car in front, and that car into the next, and so on.
      In some documented instances, the actual first cause of a chain-reaction accident such as this - maybe someone changing lanes recklessly at the last minute - can have escaped the accident altogether and the driver may even be blisfully unaware of the drama unfolding behind him.
     
Primarily people should now rely on their own voluntary car insurance policies, recommends compensation lawyer Anu Vuori from the Vahinko-Tapiola insurance company.
      The police, meanwhile, are concentrating their efforts on examining the more serious crashes.
      “It is a fact that we may not necessarily have the resources to investigate all the incidents. If one only has the compulsory traffic insurance, one may end up having to cover one’s own damage”, estimates investigating officer Toni Uusikivi from the Helsinki Police Department.
     
Mikko Puurula manages to dig his car out of the drifted snow, and the engine starts first time.
      This is a relief, for it took him a couple of days even to locate his car.
      Helsingin Sanomat followed him on his search on Sunday.
      Puurula says that in the couple of nights after the accident he has not had any nightmares about it.
      One thing he says he will long remember from the highway, however, is the crying of children caught up in this mess.
      The professional driver, who works in the haulage trade, fears that motorists in the densely-populated capital region have not learned anything from Friday’s events, or from a similar nightmarish day in March 2005, in which three people died.
      “Monday morning I drove a gig to Espoo and the weather was just as bad as on Friday. People kept overtaking me at totally scary speeds. Appalling thoughtlessness.”
     
In all, more than 40 people were injured in the southern province of Uusimaa on Friday, in multiple traffic accidents brought on by adverse road conditions and aided and abetted by poor judgement behind the wheel.
      The worst accident took place on the Lahdenväylä motorway between Helsinki and Lahti, where around a hundred vehicles were involved in an unusually massive pile-up. Even an army personnel carrier got involved, running into the back of a commuter bus.
     
Our daily article from Friday, updated on Saturday, contains links to a number of videos taken by passing motorists, one of which actually shows at least a dozen cars and vans piling into a group of stranded stationary vehicles, in some cases at considerable speed.
     
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 7.2.2012


Previously in HS International Edition:
  More than 40 injured in multiple accidents and massive delays to Helsinki public transport as snow and ice compound the chilly conditions UPDATED SATURDAY (3.2.2012)

See also:
  Totalled - insurers increasingly willing to forgo accident repairs and write off cars as bodyshop costs rise (8.11.2011)
  Experts blame Thursday´s traffic carnage on complacency and excessive speeds (18.3.2005)

Links:
  Autovahinkokeskus - The Finnish Center for Salvaged Vehicles
  Finnish Motor Insurers´ Centre

ESA JUNTUNEN / Helsingin Sanomat
esa.juntunen@hs.fi