Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

April 24, 2014

A Victory for the Public’s Right to Know

In a reversal that highlights the power of public opinion, the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) is backtracking on a plan to stop receiving reports on hazardous materials shipments that it is supposed to be regulating.

According to an article published in The Oregonian earlier this week ODOT had planned “to stop asking railroads for annual reports showing where crude oil moves in the state… because The Oregonian successfully sought to have them made public.” In other words, because a newspaper successfully argues that Oregonians have a right to know about hazardous materials being shipped through our state the state agency charged with regulating that industry planned to stop collecting the reports – reports which are required by law.

At the risk of stating the obvious, hazardous materials shipments are inherently risky. The possibility of an Oregon industrial accident as a result of negligence or improper training or procedures anywhere along a long chain of suppliers and hundreds of miles of railway track is significant. That is why ODOT is supposed to be regulating hazardous materials shipments: to exercise government’s function as the people’s representative in the interests of public health and safety. After the backlash prompted by the announcement the newspaper quotes ODOT director Matt Garrett acknowledging “in an interview that ODOT needed to begin fulfilling its duty as the state’s rail safety regulator to protect Oregonians, not the companies it oversees.”

April 17, 2014

Corporations Go to New Lengths to Avoid Responsibility

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article this week in The New York Times highlights the extraordinary measures some companies will take to avoid responsibility for their own actions. According to the newspaper, “General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website” that strips consumers of their right to sue the company for actions as simple as downloading a coupon or ‘liking’ the company or its products on Facebook.

Even more extraordinary, the paper reports: “In language added on Tuesday after The New York Times contacted it about the changes, General Mills seemed to go even further, suggesting that buying its products would bind consumers to those terms.”

The website language requires disputes with the company to be settled through arbitration rather than in the courts. Arbitration clauses have been common in the financial industry for decades but have steadily crept into other areas of American life in recent years. Large companies prefer arbitration because, unlike a trial, it is not open to the public and because the process, while supposedly fair, tends to favor deep-pocketed businesses. Since a 2011 Supreme Court ruling upholding the use of arbitration clauses in cellphone contracts this legal device has spread rabidly through the corporate world.

April 9, 2014

CNN Host Reminds Us All Why Courts Are Important

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A few days ago Michael Smerconish, a long-time talk-radio fixture who recently began hosting a show on CNN, ended his daily broadcast with a short commentary (see link below) that began as an essay about the GM ignition-switch scandal but ended up making a broader – and more important – point.

I have written several times recently about the ignition-switch situation. The faulty switches, mainly in Chevy Cobalts though other models are also effected, can sometimes turn the entire car off while it is moving at highway speeds, causing drivers to lose control. In the process they can also disable airbags. The problem led to fatal auto accidents involving at least 13 deaths (that is the number GM publicly acknowledges) and the recall of millions of vehicles – some of which have been on the road for more than a decade. The scandal has grown as it becomes clear that GM knew about the problem for years but was unwilling to spend pennies per car to fix it.

Telling his audience about the lawsuit that began the process bringing all of this to light, Smerconish recounts the story of a family searching for answers in the wake of the death of their 29-year-old daughter, of their decision to hire a lawyer and of that lawyer’s move to commission an independent assessment of the car. Everything that has happened in the years since began with this one case.

April 3, 2014

Portland Traffic Safety Questions Raised by Lack of Night Patrols

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article in Wednesday’s Oregonian raised an interesting question: how many Portlanders are aware that traffic enforcement does not take place overnight? According to the newspaper the city’s last budget cut police funding and, as a result, “the (traffic enforcement) bureau lost five full-time officer positions, and so eliminated the 9 pm to 7 am traffic shift Wednesday through Saturday.”

What this means in practice is that there are fewer officers available to enforce Oregon drunk driving laws. The newspaper quotes Portland police chief Mike Reese saying: “Traffic officers are committed to saving lives. They hold people accountable when they break the law… It’s not easy work. DUII investigations require skill to make arrests prosecutable.” The chief is asking the City Council for $300,000 in additional funds to restore four of the five overnight officer positions that have been lost.

While there are no available statistics looking at how fatal Oregon car crashes are distributed throughout the day, the newspaper notes that Washington State does keep such records. North of the Columbia River “60 percent of all fatal crashes occur between 7 pm and 5 am,” according to a Portland police spokesman cited by the newspaper. There is no reason to suppose that the pattern is not at least broadly similar here in Oregon.

March 31, 2014

Washington Industrial Accident fears Raised by Gas Explosion

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Residents of Plymouth, Washington and neighboring Hermiston, Oregon were greeted this morning by what the Associated Press described as “a mushroom cloud of black smoke visible for more than a mile.”

The cause was an explosion at a natural gas plant on the Washington side of the Columbia River. The news agency reports that the blast injured four workers at the plant and forced “about 400 people to evacuate from nearby farms and homes.” It quotes local law enforcement officials blaming the incident on a gas leak.

While it is certainly true that the incident could have been much, much worse – “I think if one of those huge tanks had exploded, it might have been a different story,” the AP quotes the local sheriff saying – the accident still raises worrisome questions about Oregon and Washington industrial accidents and about the overall quality of the safety procedures at this and similar facilities.

March 28, 2014

GM Recall Widens and Questions Multiply

by Matthew D. Kaplan

On Friday General Motors announced yet another expansion of the widening recall of its small cars. According to the New York Times, the company “is expanding its ignition-switch recall to include an additional 971,000 small cars worldwide, including 824,000 in the United States, that may have been previously repaired with defective switches.”

As I noted in a post earlier this month, well before today’s announcement GM had already recalled more than a million cars built since the 2003 model year because of a defect that may lead the ignition switch to cut off. That, in turn, could mean that air bags fail to deploy in the event of a crash. As the latest developments indicate it is now clear that many cars had the faulty switches added to them when they went in for repairs.

More disturbing, however, are the continuing revelations about the way in which GM has handled this scandal. In a move that may yet lead to wrongful death lawsuits, company documents have shown that GM misled grieving families for years, telling those who had lost loved-one in crashes linked to the flaw “that it did not have enough evidence of any defect in their cars, interviews letters and legal documents show.” This happened even as the company was internally debating the best way to fix the problem, the newspaper reports.

March 24, 2014

Salem Reckless Driver Arrested

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A reckless and dangerous driver caused problems on I-5 this afternoon but is now in jail, according to The Oregonian. The newspaper’s website reports that a 26-year-old Portland man is being held in the Marion County jail on charges of reckless driving and “18 counts of recklessly endangering another person.”

According to the newspaper, witnesses said the driver “was speeding, passing cars on the shoulder and weaving across all three lanes of traffic in a 1999 gold Ford Taurus… Oregon state police caught up with him right before 1 pm as he exited I-5 toward Salem Parkway Avenue.”

It goes without saying that incidents like these can cause serious, sometimes fatal, Oregon car accidents. In some instances these can lead to serous traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries or even deaths.

March 21, 2014

Toyota Settlement Leaves Door Open for Wrongful Death Claims

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Yesterday’s announcement that Toyota has reached a settlement with the Justice Department was striking on several accounts. First there is the settlement’s sheer size. “Toyota will pay a $1.2 billion penalty to settle the criminal probe into its handling of unintended acceleration problems that led to recalls of 8.1 million vehicles beginning in 2009,” according to an account in USA Today.

The paper adds: “the federal criminal probe… was independent of federal safety regulator and congressional probes of the Toyota sudden-acceleration recalls. It looked at whether Toyota provided false or incomplete statements to the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration in the events leading to recalls for floor mats that could trap gas pedals and gas pedals that could stick… Toyota already paid two federal fines of $16.375 million in 2010 for delays in reporting the floor mat and pedal defects, and another $17.35 million in 2012 related to an additional mat recall.”

As the paper goes on to report, the problem first came to public attention in 2009 “with a rash of runaway car reports.” Five deaths have been directly linked to the problem, but the larger issue – and the one that Toyota must continue to deal with – is evidence that the company knew about these problems but covered them up.

March 16, 2014

Price Gouging at Trauma Centers Moves into the Spotlight

by Matthew D. Kaplan

We have all heard stories of medical price-gouging, but an investigation published earlier this week by the Tampa Bay Times shows that in Florida hospitals have taken the practice to a new level.

According to a lengthy investigation by the newspaper, a change in Florida law several years ago allowed hospitals to charge special fees for the use of trauma centers. The centers are specialized facilities within emergency rooms and hospitals have long argued that establishing and maintaining them incurs unique costs which the institutions ought to be able to pass along to patients and insurance companies. For such fees “a fair cost, according to the federal government’s Medicare program, is just under $1000.” According to the newspaper, however, because the fees are not regulated “the average fee today tops $10,000; the most expensive hospital regularly charges $33,000.”

To be clear: these fees are in no way related to actual services rendered. They are, as the newspaper puts it, a “cover charge.” The paper recounts numerous instances in which patients “were charged more in trauma fees than for their actual medical care.” Since the fees are both unregulated and unrelated to the actual medical services a patient receives, the hospitals have an obvious incentive both to raise the fees as much as they can and to admit patients to the trauma center regardless of whether or not they actually need to be there. In one particularly shocking case, “an uninsured woman… was charged $33,000 even though she only needed someone to treat superficial cuts.”

March 4, 2014

GM Recalls Raise Deeper Issues of Corporate Responsibility and Regulatory Oversight

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A disturbing article published this week in the New York Times outlines a series of failures by both corporate America and the federal government. Its focus is General Motors’ recent recall notices involving well over a million vehicles manufactured since the 2003 model year (click here for GM’s latest news release with full details of models and years effected). The vehicles have a defect in the air bag system that in some instances means the air bags will not deploy during a crash because the ignition switch has been cut off.

According to the Times, GM now acknowledges that at least 13 deaths can be tied to the defect. What is disturbing is the paper’s report that the automaker’s engineers were aware of the issue in 2004 – more than a year before the first of those 13 documented deaths. Equally bad is the record of federal regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. According to the paper, “after two of the (Chevy) Cobalt crashes, the regulators took a close look at the cause, each time raising the possibility of a defect. They also met with GM about the issue. But despite the red flags, they never opened a broader investigation into whether the car was defective.”

As the paper goes on to report, a number of lawsuits related to the documented deaths have already made their way through the court system. Class action law was created precisely to enable ordinary Americans to defend their rights in cases of this sort of willful and negligent misconduct, especially when it results in wrongful deaths. The recall notices are still new and are still sinking in for many people (the initial recall was issued on February 19 and was later extended to hundreds of thousands of other vehicles) so it is also important to note that the full impact of the situation is not yet clear. It is clear that the court system will probably hear much more about these vehicles in the months and years to come.