An accident between a truck and a dirt bike lead to the death of the motorcycle operator yesterday in East Harlem. 28 year old Shamel Jefferson was riding on an unregistered and uninsured dirt bike in the left lane on third Ave when a truck cut in front of him and struck him causing his death.
Read more in the New York Daily News
Photo source: Asphalt Green
Unintentional drowning is the second leading cause of wrongful death among children under 14 and the drowning rate of African American children ages 5 to 14 is 3 times higher than the rate of Caucasian children of the same age. To prevent these type of accidents and also to fight child obesity, Asphalt Green’s Waterproofing, a non profit program, is teaching 427 children from six Bronx schools how to swim and the children love it.
Read more in The New York Daily News
9 year old Rebecca Ramnarine died and 5 other people suffered personal injury after a reckless driver crashed into the car that Rebecca was riding in with another 11 year old girl and a female driver in Brooklyn, NYC. A third car with 3 occupants was also involved in the crash. According to the media, the driver, 62 year old Kenneth Palache from Long Island, was fleeing the scene of another accident he was allegedly involved in. He ran a red light and crashed into the two other vehicles.
Palache had a suspended license and was arrested for criminally negligent homicide, leaving the scene of an accident and operating a vehicle without a license.
A new report entitled “ It’s No Accident, Examining New York’s Workplace Deaths and the Construction Industry” and published by the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) looks at deaths related to construction accidents in New York.
The reports starts with a list of the names of the 23 construction workers who died on the job in New York last year before providing a comprehensive review of the recent construction fatalities. The report demonstrates that construction has the highest rate of fatality among all industries and that the majority of people dying on the job are immigrants. Age is also an important factor in construction site fatalities: 37% of the workers who died were above 55 year old. Statistics also show that a quarter of the construction workers who died were self employed.
Because there are only 71 OSHA Health and Safety Inspectors in New York State, it is impossible for OSHA to adequately enforce construction site safety standards. Adding to that OSHA penalties are so low that they are not an incentive for employers to make the workplace safer. In 66% of the construction sites that OSHA inspected there was at least one violation of a safety standard. This high prevalence of safety violations in the construction industry is an indicator that many injuries and deaths were preventable.
Vision Zero is asking pedestrians, bicyclists and motorists to pinpoint dangerous traffic areas in New York City on an interactive map that can be accessed online directly with an email address or through a Twitter or a Facebook account. Pedestrian crash corridors are highlighted in red on the map while all pedestrian fatalities that happened from 2009 till now are indicated by a red square. Unfortunately bicycle accident fatalities are missing on the map. New York road users can share, comment, agree on and pinpoint directly on the map the following type of traffic issues:
– Not enough time to cross – Double parking – Long wait to cross – Red light running – Jaywalking – Poor visibility – Speeding – Long distance to cross – Failure to yield – Cyclist behavior
It is a fantastic tool however there is a risk of distortion. The map was launched a few days ago and we can already see that high poverty areas are typically misrepresented. This can be due to language barriers, less access to technology or maybe less interest in current events. Hopefully Vision Zero workshops in these areas will be helpful in addressing this unbalance. The map shows big areas such as the West Bronx, East Brooklyn and Harlem with with very little activity compared to the rest of the city. Areas of the city where the youngest population live such as Downtown Manhattan and West Brooklyn are the most active areas on the map.
In New York City, a memorial including the Hardhat Procession into the Cathedral will be held this afternoon at St Patrick’s Cathedral during which OSHA’s Manhattan Area Office Director Kay Gee and Labor Liaison Laura Kenny will read names of construction workers killed on the job in New York City over the past year.
Other events will be held by OSHA and by other occupational safety activists and unions such as CSEA all around New York State and around the country.
Every year in New York close to 70,000 workers will suffer personal injury or illness related to their job and hundreds of them will die on the job.
Today we are looking at fatal pedestrian and bicycle accidents in New York and in the US.This is part 3 of of our series on the Walking and Bicycling Alliance 2014 Benchmarking report.
Globally since 1980, the pedestrian fatality rate and the bicyclist fatality rate have been decreasing significantly in the US. In 1980, 8070 pedestrians and 965 cyclists died on the road compared to respectively 4432 and 677 in 2011. However while the absolute numbers dropped, the percentage of pedestrian and cyclist fatalities among all traffic fatalities increase from 12.6% in 1980 to 15.8% in 2011.
Pedestrians and cyclists who are 65 and older have a much higher risk to be involved in a fatal accident. Seniors represent 10% of pedestrians and 6% of cyclists but account for 19% of the pedestrian fatalities and 12% of the cyclists fatalities.
Numerous bicyclists and pedestrians have been severely injured and several of them have lost their lives in traffic crashes along Mc Guiness Blvd in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The corridor nicknamed “Hipster Highway” is notorious for passenger vehicles and large trucks speeding. Two years ago a study by Transportation Alternatives showed that two thirds of cars and 62% of large trucks traveled over the 30 mph speed limit with a maximum speed reaching 50 mph for cars and 47 mph for big rigs.
Things should change and residents’ safety should improve by the end of this month as the 1.1 mile stretch of Mc Guiness Blvd between Bayard Street and Freeman Street will become the third arterial slow zone in New York City. New signage will be installed, traffic signals will be coordinated to reduce speeding and the NYPD will increase enforcement on the boulevard.
The creation of 25 arterial slow zones is part of the Zero Vision Action plan to reduce traffic fatalities in the city.
After a worker fell to his death at a NYC midtown construction site, the city issued a full stop work order at the site.
The Department of Buildings issued 41 violations including 6 for work without a permit. Other violations included failure to safeguard persons or property; failure to report an accident; no record of daily inspection of suspended scaffold; work doesn’t conform to approved plans; failure to provide approved plans; failure to provide guardrails; and failure to provide protection.
When the accident happened, the worker, 34 year old Lukasz Stolarski of Brooklyn, was doing facade restoration work. He wasn’t wearing a harness and fell from a ledge he was standing on between the roof and the penthouse. He landed on the top of the sidewalk shed at the 424 West 33rd Street construction site resulting in his death.
12 people including 7 pedestrians died in auto accidents and many others were injured in speed related crashes along the Bronx Grand Concourse in New York City between 2008 and 2012. Speeding is the main cause of accidents in this dangerous area but this is about to change extremely soon as as officials announced that the the 5.2 miles Bronx corridor will be the second of 25 planned NYC arterial slow zones. The first one was introduced last week on Atlantic Ave in Brooklyn.
Starting this month, traffic signals will be synchronized to reduce dangerous speeding, new 25 mph signage will be installed and the NYPD will increase enforcement in this dangerous area of the Bronx.
The arterial slow zone program is one of the 63 measures included in New York Zero Vision Program launched by Mayor de Blasio at the beginning of the year. Throughout the city, arterial roads amount for 15% of the mileage but for 60% of pedestrian fatal accidents.
New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog