Long Island, Manhattan Accident Attorney Blog

Truck Driver Hit and Injured During Snowstorm Receives $1.9-Million Settlement

New Car Safety Features

Hospital-Acquired Illness Creates 12% Of Liability: Study

A new study from http://www.businessinsurance.com came out recently with startling numbers. More than 12 % of hospital liability costs arose from hospital-acquired infections, hospital-acquired injuries, objects left in the body after surgery and pressure ulcers. As a result, Baltimore-based Centers for Medicare and Medicaid will no longer reimburse providers for certain categories of hospital-acquired conditions and medical errors.

There is concern by risk managers that the lack of a rebursement by these social programs will trigger an increase in hospital professional liability claims. Several insurers have announced they will cease reimbursing such errors, including Chicago-based Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois.

The study was conducted to give health care managers a clearer understanding of their cost of risk compared to an industry benchmark. This was the first year the study included data on hospital-acquired illnesses. The hope is to use the new data to establish a benchmark against which future liability costs for such ailments could be compared.

There Is Nothing "Freak" About This Accident

It isn't a secret that the New York Post is a somewhat right of center publication, so it isn't really a surprise that their slant on this story in Queens doesn't ask a pretty simple question.

What was a dead tree doing on the property adjacent to the street fair? 

This dead tree that all of a sudden snapped and struck a woman, critically injuring her, should not have been left to sit there for as long as it did. Dead trees decompose and fall, and it was simply a matter of before this occurred.

The story in the Post quotes a store owner who calls it a freak accident, but we think there were quite a few other bystanders who asked "Why was a dead tree allowed to just sit on this property?"

It's a question that the accident victim's attorneys should be asking the owners of the property, who happen to be the New York and Atlantic Freight Railway.

Things Falling off of Skyscrapers

A falling pane of glass is dangerous from any height, but at several stories the consequences are magnified.

New Yorkers figured this out when a pane of glass fell several stories on August 17th and hit the sidewalk.

It is a minor miracle that only six pedestrians were slightly injured.

Since we believe that accidents don't happen as much as they are caused, we think there needs to be some investigation as to the safety of the rest of the glass in that building. We also think that anyone who washes those windows need to be interviewed, and the people responsible for the installation and maintenance (no matter how long ago it took place) need to be interviewed as well.

It could be that the whole thing truly was a freak accident, but in our experience as  New York injury lawyers, those "out of the blue" accidents are exceedingly rare.

Health effects from 9/11 still in the air

If you follow the link below, you will find an article in The New York Times that describes how the asthma rates are going up among adults who lived near the World Trade Center.

Please don't think of this as paranoia. If the rate had only gone up half a percentage point then The Times would not have even bothered to report it.

There are still people suffering from the effects of 9/11, and New York is not acting with enough speed when it comes to helping them. 

Bus Accident case settled for $4.5 Million

One of our recently settled cases for $4,500,000 involved a pedestrian and a bus. At the time of the incident, which occured on February 14, 2006 at around 3 pm, the plaintiff was walking eastbound on Crown Street in Brooklyn. Upon arriving at the intersection of Crown Street and Utica Avenue the light was red, so the plaintiff stopped, stood and waited. Eventually, the pedestrian crosswalk signal indicated that ti was safe to cross Utica Avenue, so the plaintiff proceeded to step off the curb and cross the avenue in the designated crosswalk. As she was doing so, she was struck by the defendents' school bus, which was making a left turn from Crown Street onto Utica Avenue.

According to Crash Statistics Online, there were 12, 498 non-fatal bus accidents just last year. 481 of those bus accidents, 3.85 %, occured in the State of New York. This number is significantly higher then the rest of the northeast and mid atlantic. However, just about any state in the rust belt region has higher bus accident rates then New York and another big state, California, nearly triples our bus accident total.

The U.S. Department of Transportation has recently conducted research on bus and passenger accident prevention.  They have created five phases to help in accident prevention:

    1. Development and Implementation of an accident prevention program

    2. Selection, Training, Evaulation and, if necessary, termination of transit system employees

    3. Promotion of Patron Safety/Awareness

    4. Design options available in the vehicle procurement phase that will prevent accidents

    5. Development of Safety Policies and Procedures