Every year in New York and in the US, motorcycle operators and bicyclists are injured or die during crashes with a motorist. Sometimes the motorcyclist or the bicyclist are at fault and sometimes the accident is due to the motorist’s lack of attention. Here is an excellent video on how to share the road safely with motorcycles and bicycles.
When a water emergency happens, hospitals have to be ready. They need to plan ahead how to deal with the loss of water for consumption, equipment sterilization, laundry and dialysis. Hospitals in West Virginia faced that emergency recently. The Joint Commission staff met with representatives of 7 of the affected hospitals to discuss how they handle this situation and subsequently released a paper about the lessons that can be learned from the week long water emergency that resulted from the chemical spill of the Elk River.
Read the paper from the Joint Commission here
A worker who was repairing a car on the sidewalk in Brooklyn, NYC, was struck by a hit and run driver and died from his injuries at the hospital on Saturday afternoon. Felipe Castro Palacios was repairing a car that was parked halfway on the sidewalk in front of the Gowanus Auto Body Shop when the accident happened. The driver of a black Nissan Altima lost the control of his vehicle and crashed into the car that Felipe was repairing as well as two other cars. The driver took off but according to the New York Daily News a witness was able to write down the plate number. The car was a rental and the police are still looking for the driver.
Felipe Palacio Castro and the Gowanus Auto Body Shop (Google Street Map)
4 people suffered serious personal injury as a result of a car accident that happened at the intersection of the Cross Bronx Expressway and White Plain Road in the Bronx, NYC, on Sunday morning. A 38 old man crashed his car into a van parked by a flower store injuring the 3 passengers inside it. The crash was so strong that the car flipped on his roof and the minivan crashed into another vehicle. The reckless driver who suffered critical injury to his arm managed to get out of the wreckage and tried to flee the scene. He was caught 2 streets away by the police and brought to the hospital where his arm was amputated. The 3 passengers of the van suffered neck and back injuries and were also taken to a hospital for treatment. The accident happened in front of a flower shop (picture) where people were buying flowers for mother’s day. Read more in the New York Daily News
The night before a few blocks away a livery cab driver lost the control of her SUV and crashed into a barber shop injuring a child. Read more here
Mayor de Blasio said that 286 traffic deaths in New York City compared to 333 homicides in 2013 compelled him to take action and launch the Vision Zero program. Last week the mayor announced that close to $30 million of his executive budget would be allocated to DOT initiatives to make the streets safer such as the installation of speed bumps in school zones and the development of additional slow zones as well as speed cameras and street redesign. $13 million were also allocated to NYPD traffic enforcement and $ 1.1 for a Taxi and limousine advertising campaign about safety.
Read more in Streetblog
New York Construction worker Kyle Brown died because his contractor MTL Design Inc. failed to provide and ensure the use of fall protection safeguards according to OSHA. In its investigation OSHA discovered that Brown was wearing a fall protection harness but it was useless because the contractor didn’t provide workers with a mean to connect to an independent anchorage point to stop a fall.
Brown was installing a metal decking on the top of the roof of an automobile dealership in construction in Pulasky, NY when he was blown off the roof by a wind gust and fell 24 feet to his death.
Read more in the OSHA Press Release
A female pedestrian was fatally struck by a school bus with several children on board at the crossing of 93rd street and Second Ave yesterday afternoon. The victim is Jessica Schnieder, a woman in her 40s who was crossing 93rd Street. According to CBS New York, there were a lot of construction going on near the cross street and the bus started to back up because of traffic. The bus struck the woman as she was walking in the crossroad. She died at the scene of severe head trauma. See video for more
A new feed on NYC Open Data portal provides New Yorkers with easy to read data on traffic crashes that are updated on a daily basis. Previously data on traffic accidents were only available monthly on the NYPD website.
This new format allows users to filter the information by date, time, borough, zip code, latitude and longitude, street name and cross street name, number of persons injured and killed including number of pedestrians, cyclists and motorists injured or killed as well as the contributing factors of the accident for each vehicle involved.
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It’s too early to say if the first Vision Zero measures to reduce traffic fatalities are effective yet. After a decrease of the number of people injured or killed in vehicle accidents in New York last February, the numbers are up again for March 2014 and are pretty much at the same level as they were a year ago according to the most recent statistics from the NYPD
The number of pedestriandeaths, 11, is exactly the same in March this year than it was in March last year. 952 pedestrians were injured in auto accident this march compared to 990 in March 2013 and 820 the month before. The number of bicyclists injured was also pretty much the same from one year to the other.
Bus Accidents were slightly on the rise from one year to the other with 572 accidents in March 2014 compared to 523 in March 2013.
New York Personal Injury Attorneys Blog