Articles Posted in Motor Vehicle Accidents

by

A story from Northern California offers a vivid reminder for us here in Oregon that drunk driving can lead to all kinds of trouble above and beyond car crashes. According to a recent account in the Red Bluff Daily News, a man is now in prison after what appears to have been an alcohol-fueled road rage incident on Interstate 5.

The paper reports that the alleged incident unfolded after a 21-year-old driver passed a car on the right. That vehicle was driven by 66-year-old Warren Hawkins. The younger driver reportedly went around Hawkins after driving behind him for some time in the fast lane where Hawkins was reportedly traveling several miles per hour below the speed limit.

Hawkins allegedly responded by first pulling alongside the younger man “yelling and making hand gestures,” and then attempting to side-swipe him twice. He then moved back behind the 21-year-old’s vehicle so that he could ram it – again, twice. The paper reports that Hawkins next followed his alleged victim when he exited the interstate, making a u-turn in an intersection and then coming “back the wrong way… before swerving left to complete a circle” around the younger man. The out-of-control driver was reportedly shouting “death threats out an open window” when police arrived on the scene.

Continue reading

by

A trial now underway in Washington is raising serious questions about railway safety. According to TV station KGW, the Longview, Washington trial focuses not only on safety policies at the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company, but on how carefully those policies are enforced.

The Washington rail crash trial stems from “a collision between a train and a shuttle van in which three people were killed and a forth was critically injured,” the station reports. At issue is a BNSF policy of parking all stationary trains at least 250 feet from a rail crossing. The victims in this particular case died after being struck by a train that apparently could not see their van as it crossed the tracks because another train was parked only 50 feet from the crossing, blocking the engineer’s view.

One complication facing the victims’ families, however, is the fact that the incident took place on the railway company’s property, where laws designed to protect the public at public crossings do not have effect. Private crossings, such as those on company property, have “no requirements for lights or a crossing arm,” the paper reports.

Continue reading

by

A Portland man faces the serious charge of second-degree assault after an alleged attack on a Portland bike rider that resulted in an Oregon bicycle accident, according to The Oregonian.

The incident took place early Tuesday morning as Joe Santos, a Portland police sergeant, was riding his bike to work along Northwest Cornell Road. Santos told investigating officers after the incident that an SUV nearly hit him, then, inexplicably, “about a block later, the driver stopped so suddenly that Santos had to veer into oncoming traffic.” Santos “slapped” the SUV to try to alert it to his presence, and was rewarded with the car abruptly stopping, going into reverse and trying to hit him. When Santos tried go grab his bike and flee to the safety of the sidewalk the SUV allegedly went after him yet again – hitting the bike, but missing the rider.

Fortunately Santos, though shaken, was able to get the license plate of the SUV. Later that day police took a suspect into custody, the newspaper reports, citing police sources.

Continue reading

by

The state department of transportation plans to address issues raised by the death of a cyclist in a Portland bicycle accident last December on a notoriously dangerous stretch of SW Barbur in Southwest Portland.

As I noted in a post last December, the issue most recently came to public attention with the death of 26-year-old Angela Burke. Burke was struck by an allegedly drunk and stoned driver as she rode along a section of SW Barbur that is notorious among local cyclists as one of the scarier stretches of road in Greater Portland. According to media reports at the time the driver who hit Burke was traveling at approximately 75 mph in a 35 mph zone.

According to Bike Portland, the ODOT plans to install four beacons along the most dangerous stretch of road: the crossing points near the Rasmussen apartments where a crosswalk straddles the road very close to a potentially dangerous bend. The website quotes an ODOT spokesman who notes that “the speed of the vehicles and the curve” make the crossing “a real challenge.”

Continue reading

by

An Oregon truck accident on Interstate 84 closed the road for several hours last week and sent two people to the hospital, though its most notable feature may have been that it was not even worse than accident reports indicate.

According to the Associated Press the Oregon semi-truck accident began when a driver fell asleep at the wheel around 1 am while traveling west on I-84. The news agency reports that the truck then “rear-ended a tow truck with a car in tow” on the dark road.

The truck driver and the owner of the car (who was riding in the tow truck) required hospitalization following the accident. The driver of the tow truck was not injured. According to the AP, the driver of the semi received a citation for “careless driving.”

Continue reading

by

A truck driver from California died last week in an Oregon truck accident on I-84 near Rufus, east of Portland, according to The Oregonian.

The victim, identified by police as Lino Domingo Lopez-Hernandez, died as a result of an unusual chain of events that began with a blowout on his own vehicle. Sorting out any resulting Oregon personal injury or wrongful death claims that may eventually arise from the accident is likely to be a complex business.

According to the newspaper, the accident began to unfold shortly after midnight last Thursday as Lopez-Hernandez was driving his big-rig west on I-84. The truck lost two tires and an axel for reasons that remain unclear. Lopez-Hernandez immediately pulled over. He was walking along the side of the road looking for the missing pieces of his truck when a pick-up, also traveling in the westbound lane, hit the truck debris, hurling it into Lopez-Hernandez. “The flying debris sent him over a guardrail and about 200 feet down an embankment, where authorities found his body,” The Oregonian reports.

Continue reading

by

Schools in Wallowa, in the far east of Oregon, are targeting distracted driving by going directly to the source: placing students in a car equipped with virtual reality technology to convince them of exactly how real the danger is.

According to the Wallowa County Chieftain roughly 50 of the people put through the simulator on a single day at an area high school wound up being ‘victims’ of Oregon distracted driving or Oregon drunk driving accidents. The paper quotes the “impaired driving awareness instructor” who ran the event saying that in the real world “eighty percent of accidents are due to driver distraction” (a statistic which obviously goes far beyond cellphones to encompass ‘legal’ distractions – such as the radio or CD player or dealing with kids in the back seat).

The project, the paper reports, is organized by “UNITE, a Michigan-based organization that sends three teams around the nation for similar demonstrations at high schools and colleges.” The set-up involves placing students in a stationary car while wearing virtual reality goggles. Both the car and the goggles are connected to a computer. To simulate phone-related distractions and texting students use their own cellphones. Drunk driving is simulated by having the computer acknowledge a students’ actions in the car with the appropriate delay for varying levels of intoxication.

Continue reading

by

A six-car pile up blocked traffic on Interstate 5 last week and police say a blown tire may have been what set the incident in motion, according to The Oregonian. The dangerous Oregon car accident involved a vehicle jumping the median into on-coming traffic.

The newspaper, quoting Oregon State Police sources, reports that an SUV was traveling north on I-5 at mid-afternoon when the driver “lost control at about 2:30 p.m., crossing a grass median and slamming into an oncoming car just north of Portland Road NE.”

The attribution of the accident to a blow-out remained speculative at the time the paper went to press. The results of the accident were not: the SUV hit one oncoming car head-on. Four other vehicles swerving to avoid the main collision wound up hitting each other. Surprisingly, for so large an accident, only three people from the six vehicles were hospitalized, and only one of those injuries was reported to be serious, according to the newspaper.

Continue reading

by

The criminal phase of the trial of a Tri-Met driver responsible for what The Oregonian calls “the worst transit tragedy in modern Portland history” has reached a turning point. Earlier this month, Sandi Day was convicted on all six charges she faced stemming from last year’s fatal Portland bus crash.

According to the newspaper, the judge “ordered Day to pay more than $1000 in fines, perform 200 hours of community service and complete a traffic safety course.” She also faces the loss of her commercial driving license and possible additional fines if she does not “comply with her sentence within a year.” As I noted in a post early last summer, the accident has already led to changes in Tri-Met’s operating procedures.

Day drove her bus into five people last April as she executed an illegal left turn. According to The Oregonian, police testified at her trial that she kept driving for 2.5 seconds after hitting five pedestrians in a crosswalk at approximately 13 miles per hour. Two of the pedestrians were dragged beneath the bus and died. Three others were injured.

Continue reading

by

An article just published by the online magazine Slate raises an intriguing question: is it safer to drive head-first into a parking spot, the way most Americans do? Or to back into it? The question is relevant because if there is strong data suggesting that backing into parking spaces is, by and large, safer that, in turn, would mean that we ought to begin looking at Oregon car accidents in different ways.

We all know, of course, that Portland car accidents can lead to any number of traumas: Oregon brain injuries, injuries to children, even wrongful death. Who among us has not had a near miss either when backing out of a parking space or when passing by (whether in a car or on foot) someone who is doing so without paying sufficient attention.

Though Slate notes that “parking lot crash statistics are a bit hazy,” it goes on to note: “a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in 2001 and 2002 found that 14 percent of all damage claims involved crashes in parking lots (some number of which must have involved vehicles moving in and out of spaces).” Further, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in a report to Congress last year estimated that “backover crashes,” as they are officially known, “cause at least 183 fatalities annually” as well as approximately 7000 injuries. The NHTSA is studying new rules that it hopes may lower these numbers by cutting the size of vehicle blind spots.

Continue reading
50 SW Pine St 3rd Floor Portland, OR 97204 Telephone: (503) 226-3844 Fax: (503) 943-6670 Email: matthew@mdkaplanlaw.com
map image