Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

January 21, 2013

Oregon Car Crash Kills One

A three-vehicle Polk County, Oregon car accident over the weekend left one man dead and five people hospitalized, according to a report in The Oregonian.

The Oregon auto accident took place in the town of Dallas, about 60 miles southwest of Portland. The newspaper, quoting the Oregon State Police, reports that the sequence of events began Saturday evening when a van driven by a man from Woodburn “was heading west when it traveled across the center line and collided” with a vehicle headed in the opposite direction on State Route 22.

The driver of the eastbound vehicle was a 69-year-old Silverton man. He was pronounced dead by paramedics responding to the accident. Two other people in the car were taken to a Salem hospital with what The Oregonian describes as “critical” injuries. The driver of the van was not seriously injured in the initial crash, but was struck by a third vehicle, a westbound pickup truck, when he stopped to assess the initial accident. He was taken to the same Salem hospital as the victims in the car and is reported to be suffering from “serious injuries.” The two people in the third vehicle were treated in McMinnville for minor injuries.

January 17, 2013

Portland Bus Safety At Issue as Tri-Met Drivers Reject Longer Workday

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The union representing Tri-Met workers has rejected proposed work rules that would have allowed bus and other transit drivers in the Portland area to work 14-hour shifts, according to a report published in The Oregonian.

The paper reports that “the union representing operators, mechanics and support staff quickly rejected the plan on Monday, saying it didn’t go far enough to address the growing problem with exhaustion.” The paper quotes a union leader saying “No human being, especially one transporting passengers through city traffic, can safely operate a bus over a 14-hour workday, day-after-day.”

The proposed work rules would “limit” drivers to a 14-hour workday and require at 10 hours off between shifts. According to the paper the proposed work plan would have applied to drivers of both buses and light-rail trains. The paper notes that “the current policy, based on service days, makes it easy for a driver to finagle extra overtime by working marathon runs.”

January 12, 2013

Cabbage Hill Crash: New Details Emerge

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Following up on a story I first blogged about last week, The Oregonian reports that federal authorities have ordered the bus company involved in the New Year’s weekend crash on Deadman’s Pass section of Cabbage Hill, east of Pendleton, to cease operations in the United States. According to the newspaper, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration announced on this week that the Canadian company operating the tour bus had let the driver work “well beyond” the 70 hours per 8 days maximum allowed by US law.

As the paper notes, “nine people died in late December when (the) bus… ran through a guardrail and rolled down a steep embankment along Interstate 84.” A further 39 people were injured in the fatal Oregon bus crash, an accident which, as I noted last week, raises significant wrongful death questions.

The action taken by federal officials raises several issues. Obviously, rules designed to prevent driver fatigue need to be rigorously enforced in the interest of public safety, but enforcing those rules on a foreign company is likely to involve significant technical and logistical issues. It is especially worrisome that, as The Oregonian reports, the order requiring the company to cease US operations “specifically cites the company for failure to test the driver for drugs and alcohol prior to the crash, failure to properly maintain driver qualification requirements and failure to operate a motor vehicle in a safe manner.” To be fair, it is difficult to imagine that Canadian national or British Columbian provincial law (the bus company is headquartered in Vancouver, B.C.) does not also address most if not all of these issues – but assuming that it does, one has to wonder why two governments as closely tied as ours and Canada’s are not able to exchange information that might go a long way toward protecting public safety.

January 4, 2013

Oregon Wrongful Death Questions in Wake of Bus Crash

by Matthew D. Kaplan

By now most Oregonians will have read or heard about the terrible New Year’s weekend bus crash on Deadman’s Pass in the east of the state. According to The Oregonian, nine people died and dozens were injured last weekend when a tour bus “skidded off Interstate 84 east of Pendleton and rolled 200 feet down a mountain canyon.”

The newspaper quotes an Oregon state police spokesman saying that 39 injured people were taken to hospitals across three states. A total of 49 people were aboard the bus at the time of the accident, meaning that only one person avoided injury in this Oregon bus crash. The newspaper reports that the passengers ranged in age from seven to 73 years old. Most were Americans and Canadians of Korean ancestry.

The bus was reportedly returning from an excursion to Las Vegas at the time of the accident, which occurred on a dangerous stretch of the Cabbage Hill section of I-84. “Oregon state police investigators will look into the possibility that (the) bus driver… was driving too fast for the slippery conditions on the notorious mountain pass,” according to the paper. “Investigators will also determine if driver fatigue was a factor,” The Oregonian reports.

December 31, 2012

Fatal Portland Pedestrian Accident Leads to Candlelight vigil

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The Oregonian reported last week on a sad and solemn vigil held in Portland to commemorate the life, and untimely Oregon pedestrian truck accident death, of a 27-year old woman who lived in the city’s Hayhurst neighborhood.

The woman died earlier this month when she was struck by a truck as she crossed the road at the intersection of the Southwest Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and Shattuck Road. According to the newspaper she was crossing at a marked crossing place and was doing so with the pedestrian walk signal. The Portland auto accident took place barely a week before Christmas. The vigil, reportedly attended by approximately 25 people, was held two days later.

Addressing the gathering Roger Averbeck of Southwest Neighborhoods Inc’s Transportation Committee said: “This was not an accident. It was a crash, and crashes are preventable,” according to The Oregonian. He called on local residents to advocate for safer, more pedestrian-friendly, streets. The paper goes on to note that in Southwest Portland: “many of the major arterials lack sidewalks, and some have very few places where pedestrians can safely cross. High speed vehicles make travel more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists.”

December 26, 2012

A Holiday Reminder: Kids and Concussions

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A recent news release from SafeKids Oregon – “Concussions: What You Need to Know” – offers an important note of caution during this holiday season, highlighting the dangers of Oregon TBI injuries related to youth sports and offering important pointers for parents who want their kids to be as safe as they are active.

The news release highlights findings presented in a webinar organized by the group earlier this month (see the link below for the press release – which also contains a link to a video of the complete SafeKids presentation). As the SafeKids news release shows, more than a third of all traumatic brain injuries nationwide are caused by falls. Moreover, “more than one in three children who play team sports are injured seriously enough to miss practices or games, and some suffer life-long consequences.”

The report goes on to note that “concussions can happen to children in many activities so knowing how to identify and prevent them is important.” To that end, the webinar points users toward free online training sessions offered by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One set of videos is aimed at coaches and another (funded jointly by the CDC Foundation and the NFL) targets clinicians with the goal of improving both recognition and initial treatment.

December 21, 2012

The Case for a More Transparent CPSC

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article published this week in the online magazine Slate makes a compelling case that the Consumer Product Safety Commission, an organization many of us think of as an important guardian of Americans’ safety and rights, could do a lot more to make its own workings transparent.

The article begins with a simple example: “Sometime before October 2011, an unknown child was injured by an unknown product that was produced by an unknown manufacturer. The Consumer Product Safety Commission published a report of the injury in its online database of safety complaints.” It also notes that the unnamed company has so far been able to contest what it views as inaccurate charges that its product is unsafe by filing a secret lawsuit against the CPSC, all the while keeping its name, its product and the allegations against it from being identified in the CPSC database.

Perhaps even more shocking is the revelation that when a federal court in Maryland allowed the secret suit to go forward, accepting the company’s argument that letting people know it was being sued might be bad for business, the government opted not to appeal that decision. According to Slate three consumer-advocate groups have since then been “granted permission to intervene by the court in October (and) are pressing on” with the appeal that the federal government refused to lodge.

December 17, 2012

Oregon Wrongful Death Suit Filed in Klamath

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An Oregon wrongful death lawsuit filed recently in Chiloquin raises new questions about the conduct of an area children’s center that has had a rocky relationship with state and local authorities.

According to the Klamath Falls Herald & News, the Oregon wrongful death suit against Kleos Children’s Community and the Klamath County Department of Human Services alleges that “a wheelchair-bound 14-year-old placed at Kleos under the directive of DHS died as a result of complications from two bilateral fractures to both femurs” as a result of a November 2010 accident.

The paper and local television station KOBI report that the suit claims that DHS was negligent in placing the child at a facility that, it says, could not properly address his “medical and physical needs.” The newspaper reports that the suit claims that Kleos was negligent in its treatment of the boy – both in initiating the actions that resulted in the accident, and, later, in its treatment of him following the incident. The boy died a day after suffering the two broken legs “when two employees of Kleos dropped him while trying to move him from his wheelchair to a new location.”

December 13, 2012

A Broader Definition of Oregon Distracted Driving?

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article published last week in The Oregonian’s ‘Hard Drive’ column asked a simple question: if using a cellphone behind the wheel is considered sufficiently dangerous to warrant Oregon’s distracted driving law, what about other potential distractions?

The question was prompted by Washington’s new law legalizing marijuana use. Pot may be legal, but should you be driving with it in your system? If marijuana is going to be legal to consume, should its potential to impair a driver be treated more-or-less the same way that we treat alcohol consumption and driving?

If the answer is ‘yes’ that opens an entirely separate conversation about impairment levels and the best way to measure them. For our purposes, however, the question is broader. As The Oregonian puts it, “whether it’s applying lipstick or reading a book (or flicking ashes from a Camel), trying to micromanage and ban every kind of distraction isn’t the quixotic endeavor that it used to be.”

December 8, 2012

Suspected Oregon Drunk Driving Accident is a Holiday Reminder

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A single car accident in the early hours of Friday morning is calling attention to the problem of Portland drunk driving and the damage it can cause.

According to a report in The Oregonian, in the early hours of Friday “a gold four-door 1998 Toyota Corolla crashed into the overpass abutment at Northeast 33rd Avenue and Columbia Boulevard, ejecting the 34-year-old driver from the vehicle.” The paper notes that the woman wound up trapped underneath the car. After being rescued she was taken to an area hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries.” The newspaper quotes police sources saying that an investigation is still in progress, but that the crash appears to be alcohol-related.

While we can take some small consolation from the fact that this terrible accident involved only a single car, it also serves as a powerful reminder of the damage drunk driving can do – a reminder that is especially timely as we enter the heart of the Holiday Season. The period between Thanksgiving and the New Year is always filled with parties, visits to and from relatives and many, many opportunities to overindulge.