Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

April 17, 2012

Preventing Traumatic Brain Injuries Emerges as NHL Priority

They are not slickly produced but, arguably, ought to be up for some sort of award. Throughout the long hockey season the NHL has not only been assessing tough penalties on players who cross the line in what was already a rough sport: the league has been going out of its way to explain its decisions as part of hockey’s efforts to reduce traumatic brain injuries and other serious injuries to players.

As the season began the league hired Brendan Shanahan, a recently retired player known for his toughness throughout a long and distinguished NHL career, as its Senior Vice President of Player Safety. Enforcing new rules governing blind-side hits, hits to the head and other dangerous maneuvers, Shanahan has spent the season handing out suspensions both for moves that would have been legal a year go and for others that were never legal, even in the rough-and-tumble world of the NHL.

What is different is that these disciplinary actions are not announced merely with press releases from the league office. Every one of these suspensions is explained by Shanahan himself in videos posted on the league’s website. In these videos Shanahan replays video of the infraction in slow motion, usually from several angles, and explains in detail the reasoning that led both to a decision to suspend a player and to the particular punishment he has meted out. There’s nothing quite like it anywhere else in professional (or college) sports.

April 13, 2012

Oregon Unsafe Product Verdict in Firefighters’ Deaths

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A Portland jury recently awarded $70 million in damages to a pilot who was injured as well as the family of another pilot who was killed in a 2008 helicopter crash, according to The Oregonian.

The case involved the 2008 crash of a helicopter “on a California mountainside killing nine firefighters, including eight from Oregon: it was either a well-known engine flaw or an overloaded craft,” the newspaper reports. The Oregon unsafe products verdict established that, in the jury’s view, the fault lay with the helicopter’s manufacturer rather than with the pilots. It was, one of the attorneys involved told the paper, a vindication for the pilots, living and dead. The “jurors unanimously said the crash wasn’t the pilot’s fault.”

The case turned on a defect in the helicopter’s engine. “General Electric, maker of the helicopter’s engines… knew for at least six years there were problems with a fuel control valve in the commercial engines the company built for Sikorsky S-61 helicopters,” the paper, citing the plaintiffs’ attorney, reports. GE blamed the crash on overloaded equipment and said the pilots were responsible because they allowed too many people and too much equipment onto their helicopters.

April 10, 2012

Hillsboro Blast Injures Ambulance Employee

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The explosion of an oxygen tank as it was being filled left an employee of the Metro West Ambulance service in Hillsboro injured over the weekend, according to a report in The Oregonian. The newspaper quotes the victim’s father saying that the employee received first- and second-degree burns and is currently in intensive care.

According to the newspaper the victim, “a volunteer firefighter with the Scappoose Fire Department,” was on duty, but working alone when the accident took place. He “was filling oxygen tanks at the (ambulance) service’s headquarters… when a malfunctioning valve caused an explosion and fire,” the newspaper reports, citing a spokesperson for the ambulance company.

Though most of us would not think of an ambulance company as a potential site for an Oregon industrial accident this incident is a reminder that, in legal terms, industrial accidents can involve almost any sort of business.

April 6, 2012

Oregon Home Explosion Leaves More Questions then Answers

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The explosion of a mobile home in Damascus, Oregon has raised numerous questions, even as seven families struggle with its aftermath, according to The Oregonian. The newspaper reports that the families are currently being helped by the Red Cross.

Their homes were damaged after a nearby mobile home exploded for reasons that remain unclear. According to the newspaper “the blast damaged a water main that serves about 30 people who live in the mobile home development.” Investigators have ruled out a natural gas leak as the cause of the Oregon explosion, but have few answers beyond that.

“At this point, you can’t rule anything out,” a Clackamas Fire District spokesman told The Oregonian. “There are still all kinds of possibilities – and combinations of possibilities – so we don’t want to speculate.” What is certain is that the damage caused by this catastrophic accident will disrupt many lives for some time to come. The inside of the mobile home that exploded was unoccupied, but a man who was sitting on the unit’s porch was badly burned.

March 31, 2012

National Window Safety Week

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Tomorrow, April 1, marks the beginning of National Window Safety Week. I’ve written about the dangers of open windows on several occasions in the past, notably last summer when there was a spate of Oregon injuries to children stemming from open-window accidents in the Portland area. In one particularly disturbing incident a toddler in Southeast Portland suffered a skull fracture after falling from a second-story window.

Raising awareness, and stopping preventable accidents like this, are the goals of National Window Safety Week, which is organized by Safe Kids USA (see link below).

A key element of awareness – one that should be emphasized to every parent of a small child – is the fact that screen windows offer only a false sense of security. As the Safe Kids website says: “screens keep bugs out, not kids in.” To ensure that children do not press on screens and tumble through the window, “window guards should be installed to prevent the little ones from being able to fall outside. They are easy to install and should have a release mechanism in the event of an emergency or the need to move to another window,” the website states.

March 29, 2012

Industrial Accident Claims Raised by Crane Collapse Case

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A lengthy piece published this week in the New York Times tells the sad story of a 2008 industrial accident in Manhattan and the chain of events leading up to it. It is a story of corners cut and the fatal consequences that followed: of an American employer desperate to lower costs, a Chinese supplier making inflated claims for its products and due diligence that was never done.

The fatal accident involved a construction crane that collapsed at a building site on New York’s Upper West Side as a result of a faulty weld on the crane’s turntable. As the Times notes, there has been much testimony at the manslaughter trial of the crane’s owner “about the failed weld… and how the Chinese company was unable to satisfactorily perform a vital weld on the turntable. But little has been said about another aspect of the company: its description of itself was largely inflated or simply not true.”

As the newspaper goes on to report, the Chinese company, RTR Bearing Company Limited, claimed to have a 10-year history of high-end industrial work around the globe and to employ 109 people in two factories and a quality control center. In fact, the company was barely six months old when first contacted by the New York firm that eventually bought its crane, and appears to have been little more than a 3rd party marketer of other Chinese manufacturers’ goods. In an affidavit in a related civil suit, the company’s founder acknowledged that RTR actually employs only seven people, none of them engineers, and “has no factory and does no manufacturing,” the paper reports.

March 24, 2012

Oregon Marks Poison Prevention Week

by Matthew D. Kaplan

I could not let this week come to an end without taking note of the fact that it has been National Poison Prevention Week. The March 18-24 period was marked by events here in Oregon and across the country designed to raise awareness of the dangers poisons pose to children. Safe Kids Oregon and the Oregon Poison Center were the main organizers here in the state. 2012 marks the 50th anniversary of National Poison Prevention Week, which was first designated by Congress in the early 1960s.

The issues we consider during this time are important. As a news release from Safe Kids Oregon notes, “more than 90% of poisonings happen in people’s homes.” Adding that each year around 100 children aged 14 or under die from unintentional poisoning. More alarmingly, the release states that “approximately one-half of all poison-related calls to the Oregon Poison Center have to do with children ages 5 and under.”

Even more worrying is the revelation that “the greatest portion of these calls involve drugs like pain relievers.” This is noteworthy because many of us, when we think of children and accidental poisoning in the home, think of cleaning or pest control products. It is useful to be reminded that common medications can be just as deadly, especially where small children are concerned.

March 19, 2012

Discussing the Best Way to Mix Bikes and Cars on Oregon’s Streets

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The New York Times’ online forum for expert discussion, “Room for Debate,” recently published an excellent look at bike-versus-car issues. While the debate was understandably somewhat New York-centric, it raised a number of interesting points that merit some thought on our part here in Oregon.

Portland, of course, has a far more bicycle-friendly reputation than New York City. As we have seen on too many occasions, however, that fact alone is not enough to ensure that urban bike riding here in Oregon is as safe as it ought to be, or that Portland bike and car accidents become as rare and unusual as they should.

As one of the participants, author Peter Calthorpe, writes “The answers are simple: create safe bike lanes, generous pedestrian spaces, visible, and short crossings and narrow car lanes to slow traffic.” As he readily acknowledges, this is easier said than done. It is important, though, to remember that this discussion is far from theoretical. As another participant, Yale Law School professor Tracey Meares, notes, on taking over as Miami police chief a few years ago John Timoney discovered “that vehicular homicides outnumbered ‘regular’ homicides.”

March 16, 2012

Traumatic Brain Injury Concern Helps Spur Anti-Fighting Movement in Youth Hockey

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An excellent online article at Motherlode, the New York Times’ parenting blog, considers the question of fighting and youth hockey. I have written on a number of occasions about the risk here in Oregon of traumatic brain injuries and spinal cord injuries in sports, especially at the college and pro levels and in heavily physical sports such as football and hockey.

The Times article, however, looks closely at the question of youth hockey. This level of the sport needs to receive more attention not only because it involves children, but also because children are more prone to injuries than highly trained (and better-equipped) professionals. On a deeper level, youth sports also require our attention because it is here that young athletes establish habits that can be extremely difficult to break as children become teens and teens become adults.

As Motherlode notes, the NCAA long ago proved that you can have exciting hockey games without fighting, “but youth hockey has so far followed the lead of the National Hockey League and allowed – even tacitly encouraged – fighting in some youth leagues for players from 16 to 20.” Now, however, the article notes that USA Hockey and Hockey Canada are both considering rule changes that would effectively outlaw fighting in non-professional leagues throughout North America, possibly as early as next season.

March 14, 2012

Oregon Traumatic Brain Injuries and the Link to PTSD

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An important article recently published in Science Daily offered details of a new study providing the first scientific evidence linking traumatic brain injuries to post-traumatic stress disorder. This development is especially important because it confirms something that many people who follow the issue have, until now, known only anecdotally.

Through numerous books and movies PTSD has come to be associated with war and other trauma-inducing disasters. The new study, published in the journal Biological Psychiatry, however, offers “the first evidence of a causal link between traumatic brain injury and an increased susceptibility to post-traumatic stress disorder,” according to Science Daily.

The article notes that “the reasons for this correlation are unknown.” It is not possible at this time to say whether the apparent link between traumatic brain injuries and PTSD is physical or psychological. The fact that the source of the link is difficult to determine is, however, less important than the fact that it exists. The first step in beginning to recover from an Oregon traumatic brain injury is to understand the long-term consequences that may accompany the injury. Only by doing this can victims move past the initial shock of the injury and begin the healing process.