Oregon Injury Lawyer Blog

December 22, 2011

Oregon Train Accident Spotlights Safety Issues at Crossings

A fatal accident earlier this month at an Eastern Oregon railroad crossing where collisions involving trains and vehicles have occurred in the past raises serious questions about corporate responsibility and road/rail safety.

According to Oregon Public Broadcasting (citing an article that originally appeared in the East Oregonian), a 63-year-old county worker died earlier this month “when a train struck a road grader on Canal Road south of Hermiston” in the Eastern part of the state. The worker was using the grader to spread gravel along one side of the tracks at the time of the accident. According to OPB “the train dragged the grader about 100 feet before it stopped.” The grader operator died at the scene of the Oregon train and car accident.

What makes this tragedy especially noteworthy are facts indicating it was ultimately preventable. As the article explains, at the crossing in question “motorists cannot see trains coming from the west until they emerge around a nearby curve. The crossing is uncontrolled, meaning it does not have traffic control arms.”

December 19, 2011

Product Liability Ruling is a Reminder for Oregonians of the Important Role of Courts and Attorneys

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The circumstances surrounding a product liability penalty announced this week by the Consumer Product Safety Commission go a long way toward explaining why both government oversight and the remedies offered by our courts are so important when defective or dangerous products find their way to market.

According to the Sacramento Bee, and an announcement on the agency’s website, the Consumer Product Safety Commission “has reached a settlement with E&B Giftware LLC of Yonkers, N.Y., resolving CPSC staff allegations that E&B failed to report a defect with its fitness balls.” The agency reports that the company has been hit with a $550,000 civil penalty as a result of its failure to act promptly on legitimate product safety issues.

A statement published on the CPSC website notes that E&B sold three million fitness balls between 2000 and 2009, despite, over that period, “47 reports of the fitness balls unexpectedly bursting when overinflated by consumers, resulting in injuries, including a fracture and bruises.” The agency notes that the balls were recalled by the company in 2009, but that more recent investigations have shown that the manufacturer was aware of some of the potential problems for a significant period of time prior to agreeing to the recall.

December 17, 2011

Government Calls for Ban on Cellphone Use by Drivers

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A pair of recent stories from Washington go a long way toward putting Oregon’s, and the nation’s, distracted driving problem in context: last week the National Transportation Safety Board formally called for a nationwide ban on “driver use of personal electronic devices,” according to the Washington Post. This came only a few days after new data compiled by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration showed that “for all the criticism and new legal bans, texting by drivers just keeps increasing, especially among younger motorists,” according to a report filed by the Associated Press.

Both of the organizations are independent federal agencies. The NHTSA studies and promotes highway and traffic safety while the NTSB is charged with investigating transportation accidents of all types (i.e. not just cars and trucks).

The NTSB statement was particularly strongly worded, according to the Post, and followed the lengthy investigation of a crash last year in Missouri in which “a 19-year-old pickup driver sent 11 texts in the 11 minutes before the accident.” The paper adds that the NHTSA’s data show that in 2009 (the last year for which numbers are available) distracted driving resulted in 5000 deaths and half-a-million injuries on America’s roads.

December 13, 2011

Snowboarder’s Return Marks the Cost of Sports Traumatic Brain Injuries

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Kevin Pierce’s long journey back to snowboarding is an object lesson for everyone here in Oregon concerned about traumatic brain injuries in sports. Once one of the world’s top riders and a likely member of the 2010 US Olympic team, the snowboarding star was severely injured “when he fell and hit his head on the icy wall” of a halfpipe where he was training.

A few weeks short of the second anniversary of that accident, Pierce got back on a snowboard, last week according to the New York Times. The paper reports that his road to recovery has been long and slow. That first run, at a ski resort in Colorado, was a slow cruise down an easy slope: “No tricks. No big air,” the newspaper reported.

Even now, Pierce’s life remains marked by “an unsteady walk, blurry vision and a diminished memory.”

December 9, 2011

Wrongful Death Questions Raised by Citations Against Mining Company

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An Idaho mine operator says it plans to contest citations and fines totaling $1 million levied by the federal government in the wake of a miner’s death earlier this year, the Associated Press reports in an article reprinted in The Oregonian. The violations that led to the citations, in turn, raise wrongful death questions and are a reminder for us here in Oregon that mine operators and other employers in hazardous industries have, at all times, both a legal and a moral obligation to do everything they can to keep employees safe.

The 53-year-old victim, a 12-year veteran of the mine according to AP, died last April after a cave-in at the place where he and his brother were working, approximately one mile underground. The two “had just finished watering down blasted-out rock and ore in the mine in the Idaho Panhandle before the collapse,” the news agency writes.

The miner’s job involved “drilling holes in a rock face, blasting it to rubble, then carting the debris to the surface to be processed into silver, lead and zinc.”

December 2, 2011

Traumatic Brain Injury Suit Targets NCAA

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An article published this week in the New York Times offers details of a “class-action suit that claims the NCAA has been negligent regarding awareness and treatment of brain injuries to athletes.”

According to the newspaper there are currently four plaintiffs involved in the suit – three football players and, unexpectedly, a soccer player. As the newspaper notes, the suit is particularly interesting because it targets the NCAA, the body that oversees most college athletics here in the United States, rather than the individual schools for which the plaintiffs played.

The focus of the article is a former University of Central Arkansas football player, described in the piece as once having been a three-sport athlete, straight-A student and talented trumpet player. Following a severe hit as he was returning a punt last year he has been unable to play. Heeding doctors’ advice he has now permanently abandoned contact sports, the newspaper reports.

November 30, 2011

New Documentary Challenges Lawsuit Stereotypes

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Earlier this month HBO launched a new documentary, Hot Coffee, that is designed to challenge entrenched stereotypes concerning our legal system and to remind all Americans of an important, but often overlooked, constitutional right: the trial by jury.

The film takes its title from the famous 1990s personal injury lawsuit involving an elderly woman who suffered a serious burn injury after spilling a cup of McDonalds coffee. As the filmmakers point out, this case became the “poster child” for frivolous lawsuits. The point of the movie is not, however, to demonstrate that the facts of this and several other high profile cases were different than was widely reported in the media (though they are, and the film does make that point strongly).

Instead, it focuses on a broader and even more important issue: the lengths to which large and powerful corporations will go to keep cases involving their negligence out of our courts and away from juries. Our Seventh Amendment guarantee of a trial by jury is one of the most fundamental rights we enjoy as Americans. Yet, as Hot Coffee demonstrates, that right has been under attack for a generation or more. Companies make getting to court difficult and winning even harder.

November 26, 2011

Oregon Wrongful Death Suit Revived by Federal Court Ruling

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A ruling earlier this month by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has opened the way for the parents of a teenager shot dead by police officers in Washington County to move ahead with an Oregon wrongful death lawsuit, according to a recent article in The Oregonian.

The case stems from the 2006 death of an 18-year old near Tigard, in Washington County, Oregon. The teenager was threatening to kill himself with a pocketknife when police officers arrived at the site of the incident. Within four minutes the officers had fired 11 shots, killing the teen, despite pleas from his family and friends that the boy posed a threat to no one but himself. The family has long claimed that the law enforcement officers overreacted and made little effort to assess the situation before using deadly force.

After the Washington County sheriff’s office issued an investigative report absolving the officers from any improper conduct the teen’s family “brought suit against the officers and the county in (an Oregon) wrongful death claim, alleging an unconstitutional use of force,” according to the newspaper. A federal district court issued a summary judgment in favor of the officers and the county, but the circuit court has now reversed that ruling and sent the case back to the lower court.

November 23, 2011

Oregon City Propane Explosion Raises Defective Product Questions

by Matthew D. Kaplan

An Oregon City propane explosion left an 80-year-old man severely burned, requiring emergency air evacuation to the Oregon Burn Center, according to a recent article in The Oregonian.

The explosion, which also killed 200 birds with which the man was working in a barn, was strong enough that it destroyed “a 10-by-12 wall and blew out a nearby garage door,” according to The Oregonian. It took place after the victim “had turned on the propane and gone to light a heater that was hanging from the ceiling in a barn.” The “active fire” was out by the time law enforcement officials arrived though the area was still filled with smoke, according to the paper.

The paper reports that “authorities are not investigating the accident,” believing that the explosion was simply the result of the propane having been left on longer than the victim intended. The published reports of the incident, however, raise questions of Oregon product liability that bear examination.

November 17, 2011

Oregon Auto Crashes Have Nearly $3 Billion Economic Impact, According to AAA

by Matthew D. Kaplan

It is simple to understand the idea: the time we spend stuck in traffic takes an economic toll (lost wages, lost sales, etc). Those expenses, in turn, are part of a broader cost to society that we all bear as a result of gridlock (lost productivity, air pollution and its associated medical costs, etc). A recent study by AAA, however, puts forward a, perhaps, more startling idea: that the societal cost of auto accidents is far higher than that of mere congestion.

As outlined in a recent article from The Oregonian, the study put the overall “cost to society” of traffic congestion at $958 million per year for the Portland-Beaverton-Vancouver metro area. An eye-popping figure, to be sure. Using the same data, however, it concluded that “the annual societal cost of traffic crashes… is $2.74 billion.” The analysis was based on 2009 data (the newspaper article, accessed through the link below, includes, in turn, a link to the original report in pdf form).

The article goes on to note that these Oregon car crash figures are roughly in line with national averages. On a national basis the spread between the true cost of vehicle crashes versus the true cost of congestion is $300 billion versus $97.7 billion, making the ratio roughly 3-to-1 at both the state and the national level.