A preliminary investigation into the ambulance delay related to a deadly fire in Queens (see previous blog) lead to the suspension of 3 FDNY dispatchers and their supervisor.
Read more in New York CBS
A biker was injured after he was hit by a police car on the corner of Farmers Blvd and 120th Street. in St Albans, Queens. The police car had its lights and sirens on and was rushing to a report of a robbery. They apparently went through a red light when the accident happened.
Read more in the New York Daily News
A woman died after being struck in the head by a subway in New York as she leaned over the platform to check if the train was coming. The 55 year old woman was waiting for the northbound 6 train at the Astor Place station when the fatal accident happened.
Read more in the New York Daily News
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.
With the actual growing shortage of qualified truck drivers, trucking companies may be tempted to lower their hiring standards to avoid turning down jobs. These companies should keep in mind that by scarifying safety for profit they put themselves at the mercy of a negligent hiring lawsuit.
Trucks are dangerous vehicles and motor carriers are responsible for any accident caused by their drivers. Therefore if the company was negligent in its hiring process in addition to the usual negligent driving claims it can also be held responsible for the personal injury, the death and the property damage resulting from an accident caused by its driver on a separate cause of action alleging negligent hiring. In some states based upon the driver’s record at the time of hiring punitive damages may be recoverable.
In his article “Negligent Driver Hiring Can Bite You in the Butt” , Don Jerrel, Associate Vice President at HNI, explains how hiring, training and keeping qualified and successful truck drivers will protect commercial carriers from expensive lawsuits and improve safety on the road by reducing truck accidents.
Everyday around 150,000 vehicles travel on a Bronx bridge that was built in 1932 and that may be about to collapse. The bridge which is the connector carrying the northbound lanes of the Major Deegan Expressway over an abandoned subway track is the oldest bridge listed in the top 10 most traveled structurally deficient bridges in the State in a new report by the American Road and Transportation Builders .
The 9 other listed bridges are all in New York City: 1 is in Staten Island, six are in Brooklyn and two in Queens.
Read more in the New York Daily News
9 people suffered severe personal injury after a SUV crashed into a wall early this morning at 5:30 am at Exit 13 of the northbound New England Thruway in the Bronx, New York. The driver of the SUV, a Cadillac Escalade from a car service company, lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a wall. The passengers, five men and 3 women all their 20s and 30s were rushed to the hospital.
Read more on ABC website
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.
Two men in their 20s riding on a bike were seriously injured after they were hit by a car in Astoria, Queens on Tuesday night around 7:00 am. Then early Wednesday around 5:00 am, a motorcycle collided with a car at the intersection of Union Turnpike and Woodhaven Blvd in Queens. The 31 year old man operating the motorcycle was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. The passenger, a 20 year old woman, as well as the car driver, a 26 year old man also suffered personal injury but were in stable condition.
As the spring is coming in New York, motorcycle enthusiasts are back on the road. Unfortunately this also means that motorcycle accidents are on the rise in the city. Last year in May there were 250 motorcycle accidents in the city during the month of May compared to 216 in April and 82 in February.
Because motorcycles offer very little protection when a crash occurs, motorcycle operators are 35 times more likely to die on the road than car passengers with head injury being the leading cause of death in motorcycle accidents.
The GM restructuring plan approved by Judge Gerber in New York in 2009 protects the automaker from product liability lawsuits related to incidents that happened before July 10th 2009, the date when the restructuring agreement went into effect.
Yesterday GM filed a motion with the Federal Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York asking Judge Robert Gerber (picture), the United States Bankruptcy Court Judge from the Southern District of New York, who presided over the General Motors bankruptcy of June 2009, to explicitly enforce this plan by dismissing 54 cases.
The move may save GM a lot of money but it also carries some risks. A coalition of 8 class-action plaintiffs countered with a lawsuit in the same court seeking to void that part of the restructuring agreement and accusing General Motors of committing bankruptcy fraud by not disclosing potential liabilities from the faulty switch.
New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog