Tennessee

Interstate 40 between Little Rock, Arkansas and Memphis, Tennessee is a roughly 135-mile corridor through the Arkansas River Valley and the Mississippi Delta that most commercial drivers approach with zero concern. The terrain is flat. The alignment is straight. There are no mountain passes, no steep grades, no dramatic features.

It’s that complacency that makes this section so dangerous.

The Southern Ice Problem

Ice storms behave differently in southern states than in northern ones, and the difference matters enormously for commercial drivers.

When a trucker starting a drive from El Paso to Kentucky mentions that they see “at least one runaway truck” every time they pass through Tennessee, they’re talking about Monteagle. The town of Monteagle sits at the summit of the Cumberland Plateau in Grundy County, Tennessee, and the descent from that plateau down to the Tennessee Valley floor on Interstate 24 is one of the most infamous truck grades in the southeastern United States.