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Fontana calls itself a hub of the trucking industry, and the numbers back it up. Three freeways box the city in, the 10/15 interchange on its west edge is the twelfth worst truck bottleneck in the country, and the warehouse belt between Jurupa Avenue and the county line sends thousands of tractor-trailers onto Sierra, Cherry, Slover and Valley Boulevard every day. When one of those trucks hurts you, you need a Fontana truck accident lawyer who will drive out here, meet you where you are and answer his own phone. Francisco Morales handles the case himself, in English or Spanish, and there is no fee unless we win.
Abogado de accidentes de camión en Fontana. Información en español ↓
Port containers headed inland ride the 10 across the south end of Fontana. Las Vegas and Cajon Pass freight comes down the 15 through the northwest corner. The 210 carries a lighter load across the north. Between the 10 and the county line is the Southwest Industrial Park, where the city’s own plan says most of the land is trucking yards, warehouses and distribution centers. The crashes happen where those trucks merge, exit and turn.
The San Bernardino Freeway is Fontana’s main truck artery, and the Cherry, Citrus and Sierra Avenue interchanges feed the warehouse district south of it. Caltrans counts about 26,600 trucks a day at Cherry Avenue, close to 14 percent of all traffic. On March 16, 2026, a semi hauling syrup overturned on the westbound 10 near Citrus Avenue before noon and covered all four lanes an inch deep; cleanup needed a vacuum truck and the freeway was shut. On August 30, 2026, a sedan ended up wedged under a loaded tractor-trailer just east of the Sierra Avenue on-ramp and its driver had to be cut free. Underride crashes and rollovers are the pattern here.
The 10 meets the 15 at Fontana’s western edge, and the 2026 national bottleneck list ranks it twelfth in the country, with trucks crawling through at an average of 40 miles an hour. The connector ramps are where the worst crashes happen. On October 21, 2025, two semis collided at the westbound 10 to 15 ramps in the early afternoon; one caught fire, at least one person died at the scene and another went to Pomona Valley with major injuries. On January 15, 2026, a semi hauling an excavator struck the 15 overpass on the westbound 10, a beam fell onto a car and its driver was killed.
The 15 crosses Fontana between Base Line and Sierra Avenue, with exits at the 210, Summit Avenue and Duncan Canyon, and it carries around 22,000 trucks a day near the 10. Southbound rigs have just come down the Cajon Pass grade, where the state limits trucks to 45 miles an hour because of the descent. Hot brakes, high winds coming through the pass and drivers at the end of a long run from Las Vegas or Barstow are the ingredients, and a semi overturned on the 15 in Fontana in January 2026 with gusty winds suspected.
Sierra Avenue runs from the 10 north past City Hall, the Lewis Library, the police station and Kaiser Fontana to the 210 and the 15. It is the road every truck leaving the freeway for the center of town uses, and the signals at Valley Boulevard, Foothill, Base Line and Summit are where semis and box trucks meet left-turning cars and pedestrians crossing to the shops. A truck making a wide right turn onto Sierra from Valley Boulevard is the surface-street crash we see most in this city.
South of the 10, the city’s Southwest Industrial Park runs from Jurupa Avenue down to the Riverside County line between Etiwanda and Mulberry, and the plan for it says the land is mostly trucking facilities, warehouses and truck storage lots. North of the freeway, the Jurupa industrial area fills the blocks between Slover, Cherry, Jurupa and Catawba up to Valley Boulevard. Rigs pull across two lanes out of yard gates, back into docks from the street and stack up at the rail crossings all day. Dock driveways and blind yard exits are the local hazard.
Cherry Avenue connects the 10 and the 210 past the old Kaiser Steel site, where the California Steel Industries mill still runs on 400 acres and the Auto Club Speedway, closed after its last race in February 2023, is becoming a logistics campus. The first 1.8 million square feet of the Speedway Commerce Center opened in 2025, with about 6.6 million planned. Every new building means more trucks on Cherry, Foothill and San Bernardino Avenue, on a road that was designed for race-day traffic a few weekends a year.
A loaded five-axle rig can weigh 80,000 pounds, twenty times a passenger car. At 55 miles an hour it needs roughly the length of two football fields to stop. On the 10 at Sierra, where the truck share is one in seven and traffic stops without warning, that math is why Fontana truck crashes produce underrides, rollovers and the injuries that go with them.
The 10/15 interchange produced two fatal truck crashes in three months. On October 21, 2025, around 1:14 p.m., two semis collided near the westbound 10 to 15 transition ramps; witnesses said one could not stop in time and hit the other, one truck burned, at least one person died at the scene and another was taken to Pomona Valley with major injuries. On January 15, 2026, just after 3 a.m., a Kenworth carrying an excavator hit the 15 overpass on the westbound 10, a metal beam fell onto a Toyota Camry and a second car struck the beam; the Camry’s driver died and two people went to Arrowhead Regional. In Fontana itself, a syrup tanker rollover closed the westbound 10 at Citrus on March 16, 2026, and a car went under a loaded trailer east of the Sierra Avenue on-ramp on August 30, 2026.
The trucking company’s insurer usually has an adjuster and an accident reconstructionist on a serious crash the same day. This is what we go after to level that field.
The driver’s hours for the run and the seven days before it. A driver who came down the Cajon Pass at hour thirteen of his day is the cause nobody sees at the scene, and the log proves it or was edited.
Speed, throttle, brake application and following distance in the seconds before impact. In the stopped traffic at the 10/15 ramps, it settles whether the rig could have stopped.
Most fleets run cameras both ways. Video of a driver on a phone coming off the Sierra Avenue ramp changes a case in a single frame.
License history, medical card, prior crashes and citations, training records, and the background check the carrier had to run before it put this driver in a truck.
Federal rules require testing after a crash with a death, an injury treated away from the scene, or a tow. We confirm the test happened on time and get the result.
Brake and tire records, the pre-trip inspection, the bill of lading, the container seal and the weight ticket. For a rig out of a Fontana warehouse, the scale ticket alone can show the load was over the limit.
The defendant is a company with an insurer and a lawyer, the rules it broke are federal, and the proof of what happened is stored on its truck. Each of those changes how the case has to be built.
The rigs on the 10 and the 15 through Fontana are hauling freight that crossed a state line or came off a ship, which puts the carrier under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations. The driver gets eleven hours of driving inside a fourteen-hour day with a thirty-minute break under Part 395, must be qualified under Part 391 and tested under Part 382, and the truck must be inspected and maintained under Part 396. A violation that caused the crash at Cherry Avenue is negligence per se in California, and the carrier explains the violation instead of you proving what a careful driver would have done.
A car on Sierra Avenue can be insured for $30,000 per person, which does not cover the first day at Arrowhead. A truck over 10,001 pounds hauling general freight in interstate commerce must carry at least $750,000 under 49 CFR 387.9, and $5 million for certain hazardous loads. Most carriers add excess policies above that, and the national companies operating out of the Fontana warehouses carry far more. The money is there to pay for a serious injury, and the insurer knows it, which is why the fight is over fault and not over the bills.
In Fontana the truck often belongs to a leasing company, the trailer to a container line or another lessor, and the load to a retailer in a distribution center on Slover. A broker matched the load to a carrier it never checked. A drayage driver is a contractor with his own thin policy pulling a chassis someone else was supposed to maintain. Each of them can share fault and each has a policy. The first job is finding all of them before the carrier makes the driver the only defendant.
Federal rules only require a carrier to keep electronic driver logs for six months. The engine’s crash data can be overwritten the next time the truck goes to work, and dash-cam video is deleted on a rolling schedule. The carrier’s insurer will have an investigator at the scene on the 10 the same day, and the warehouse’s yard cameras overwrite in days. We send a written preservation demand to the carrier, the broker, the shipper and the insurer within days, so that if evidence goes missing afterward, the jury hears why.
For speeding, tailgating, an unsafe lane change at the 10/15 ramps, running a signal on Sierra or Valley Boulevard, pulling out of a yard across traffic, distraction, fatigue or impairment. California also limits any vehicle with three or more axles or a trailer to 55 miles an hour and the right-hand lanes under Vehicle Code 22406.
The company whose USDOT number is on the door answers for its driver’s negligence and for its own: hiring a driver with a bad record, dispatching him past the hours limit, or skipping maintenance to keep the truck working. We check the carrier’s federal safety record before the first call with its adjuster.
A broker that hands loads to carriers with poor safety scores can be liable for negligent selection. A Fontana distribution center that loaded and sealed the trailer, or a shipper that overfilled a container, can be liable when the load caused the crash.
The tractor, the trailer and a container chassis usually have different owners, and a leasing company or a contract shop that signed off on worn brakes or a bad tire becomes a defendant with its own insurance.
Brake failures, tire blowouts and trailers without proper rear underride guards support product liability claims against the companies that built or sold them.
When a lane closure, a missing sign, a bad signal or a construction zone on the 10, the 15, the 210 or a city street contributed to the crash, a government claim must be filed within six months under Government Code 911.2. We calendar that deadline the day we open the file.
The companies responsible for the truck owe the full cost of what the crash did to you, not the figure their adjuster floats in the first week. In a truck case that usually includes:
Under California’s pure comparative negligence rule, a share of fault reduces the recovery by that share; it does not bar the claim. Immigration status has no bearing on any of it.
Si un tráiler, un camión de carga o una camioneta de reparto lo lesionó en Fontana, en la autopista 10, la 15 o la 210, en Sierra Avenue, Cherry, Jurupa, Slover o Valley Boulevard, la compañía de transporte y su aseguradora ya están trabajando para pagarle lo menos posible. En Fontana los camiones son parte de la vida diaria, pero eso no significa que usted tenga que cargar con las cuentas. Tiene derecho a que cubran la sala de emergencias, el tratamiento, los salarios perdidos, el carro y el daño a su vida. El abogado Francisco Morales atiende su caso personalmente en español, sin intermediarios, y viene a Fontana a verlo. La consulta es gratis y no paga honorarios si no recuperamos dinero para usted. Su estatus migratorio no cambia sus derechos. No dé una declaración grabada a la aseguradora del camión. Llámenos primero.
Search for a Fontana truck accident attorney and most of what comes up is Riverside, San Bernardino and downtown Los Angeles offices running one template for every city on the 10. Morales Law Firm is on Bonita Avenue in San Dimas, forty minutes west on the 210, and Francisco drives to Fontana to meet clients rather than asking them to come to him after a crash. He grew up in West Covina, graduated from UCLA and Loyola Law School, and worked as a certified automotive service consultant before he became a lawyer, which is useful when the argument is about brakes, following distance and what a truck’s data actually shows. He is fully bilingual in English and Spanish, he answers his own phone, and he does not hand truck cases to a case manager. More about Francisco.
We handle truck and big rig crashes throughout the Inland Empire and the San Gabriel Valley, along with car accidents in Fontana, 10 Freeway collisions, brain injury claims, motorcycle crashes, pedestrian injuries, wrongful death and uninsured motorist claims, and we come to you in Fontana.
Send a few details and an attorney, not a screener, will call you back in English or Spanish. No cost, no obligation, and no fee unless we recover money for you. Phones are answered 24 hours a day.
Cuéntenos qué pasó. Sin costo, sin obligación. Su información es privada.
If it happened on the 10, the 15 or the 210, the California Highway Patrol handles it out of the Rancho Cucamonga Area office at 9530 Pittsburg St., which patrols the freeways through Fontana. On Sierra, Cherry, Citrus, Jurupa, Slover, Valley Boulevard or any other city street, it is the Fontana Police Department at 17005 Upland Ave. We get the report either way, and on a serious freeway crash we find out whether the CHP’s Multidisciplinary Accident Investigation Team responded, because its file has the measurements and the truck data the standard report leaves out.
Nothing up front. We work on a contingency fee, a percentage of the recovery that is paid only when the case resolves. If there is no recovery there is no attorney’s fee. We advance the cost of accident reconstruction, engineers, medical witnesses, records and depositions while the case is open, and the first consultation is free. The trucking company’s insurer handles Fontana crashes every week and you are handling one once, so make the call before you give a recorded statement.
Fontana civil cases, limited and unlimited, are filed with the San Bernardino Superior Court at the San Bernardino Justice Center, 247 W. 3rd St., where the county’s Civil Clerk’s Office is. The Fontana courthouse on Arrow Boulevard handles small claims, evictions, traffic and civil harassment, not injury lawsuits. Civil filing is electronic. If the trucking company is based out of state, it may move the case to federal court in Riverside, and we plan for that from the start.
About 25 miles, thirty-five to forty-five minutes on the 210 or the 10. That is why Francisco comes to Fontana. He meets clients at home, at Kaiser Fontana, at Arrowhead or wherever they are recovering, and most of the case is handled by phone, text and email anyway. When you do want to come in, we are at 151 W. Bonita Ave. in downtown San Dimas with free parking, straight west on the 210 to the 57 and the Bonita Avenue exit.
Sí. El abogado Francisco Morales es completamente bilingüe y maneja su caso de accidente de camión en español de principio a fin: la consulta, las negociaciones con la aseguradora del camión, los documentos y el acuerdo final. Usted habla directamente con el abogado, no con un asistente, y él viene a Fontana.
Two years from the crash to file a lawsuit for injuries or wrongful death under Code of Civil Procedure 335.1. If Caltrans, the City of Fontana, San Bernardino County or another public entity contributed to the crash, a government claim is due within six months under Government Code 911.2. The useful deadline is much shorter than either, because the carrier only has to keep the driver’s logs for six months and the truck’s engine data can be gone in days.
The weight, the rules, the money and the evidence. An 80,000-pound rig does damage a car cannot, so the injuries are worse. The company that runs the truck must follow federal hours, drug testing, hiring and maintenance rules, and breaking one is negligence per se. It carries at least $750,000 in coverage and usually far more. And it holds the log, the engine data and the video that show what happened, and sends investigators to the scene the same day. The case is won by getting that evidence early.
Usually more than one company. The driver may work for a carrier, a drayage outfit or himself. The trailer or container chassis often belongs to someone else. The warehouse operator controls the gate, the yard and the driveway sightlines, and the shipper inside loaded the trailer. When a rig pulls across Slover Avenue from a blind gate into traffic, we look at all of them, at the yard’s cameras before they overwrite, and at the city’s truck route rules for that street. Each company has its own policy, and that is what pays a serious claim.
That is the standard defense, and the truck’s own equipment usually answers it. The forward camera, the engine control module and the electronic log show the truck’s speed, braking and following distance in the seconds before impact. If the rig was over the 55 mile-an-hour truck limit on the 10 or was tailgating in the backup at the 15, the picture changes. California follows pure comparative negligence, so even if you carry part of the fault, your recovery is reduced by that share rather than eliminated.
Yes. Go to Kaiser Fontana on Sierra Avenue right after the crash, or to Arrowhead Regional in Colton or Loma Linda for a serious injury; both are Level I trauma centers and neither turns away a trauma patient. After that we arrange treatment with orthopedists, physical therapists, chiropractors and imaging centers in the Inland Empire who treat on a lien and are paid from the settlement. Immigration status does not affect your right to treatment or to a recovery.
Morales Law Firm
151 W. Bonita Ave., San Dimas, CA 91773
(626) 521-5402
Free consultation, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. No fee unless we win. The truck’s data, the driver’s logs and the warehouse cameras do not wait, and neither should the preservation demand.