Wrongful Death

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 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.”

August 29, 2012

Wrongful Death Suit Filed in Teen’s Disappearance

by Matthew D. Kaplan

The family of a New York teenager who disappeared on a trip to Hawaii and is presumed dead has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii, claiming that the guides on their son’s tour made an “outrageously reckless and irresponsible decision” in taking a group of high school students into a “treacherous lava rock area,” according to accounts by the Associated Press and a local Honolulu TV station.

The 15-year-old boy from White Plains, New York was visiting Hawaii with a teen tour group. Both the umbrella group and its local contractors were named in the suit, the news agency reports. According to the AP, while hiking on July 4 the group “stopped to rest at a tide pool, authorities said. The teens were led to an area that’s out of a state-permitted area despite dangerous surf warnings, according to the suit.”

When large waves came into the tide pool the children scrambled for cover but the victim was swept out to sea. The guides and their employers contend that the adults on the scene did all they could to search for and save the victim, but he has been missing ever since and is now presumed dead.

July 31, 2012

Oregon Wrongful Death Charged by Inmate’s Family

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A lawsuit recently filed in Salem charges both doctors and prison officials with the Oregon wrongful death of a Salem man in 2010. The suit was filed by the alleged victim’s mother, according to a report in the Salem Statesman-Journal.

According to the newspaper, her son, Robert Haws, was a pre-trial detainee two years ago this month “when he got into an argument with another inmate.” The other inmate attacked Haws “hitting his head on concrete and knocking him unconscious. He died at the hospital after undergoing brain surgery and lingering for days on life support.”

At issue are “the hours following the fight and the lengthy delay in treatment for Haws’ injuries,” according to the Statesman-Journal. Haws’ mother believes that the jail staff did not give her son the attention he needed in the minutes and hours immediately after the fight. It also alleges that once Haws reached the hospital doctors treated him as if he were a patient coming down from a drug overdose despite significant evidence that he needed urgent treatment for an Oregon head trauma.

July 12, 2012

$3 Billion Healthcare Fraud Settlement Spotlights Oversight Importance

by Matthew D. Kaplan

Earlier this month news broke of a head-spinningly large fraud settlement involving the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline. According to ABC News the company “agreed to an unprecedented $3 billion settlement with the US government over allegations that the company advertised drugs for uses not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Over the years we have all become a bit numb to horror stories about the health care industry. One of the few things both sides in the debate surrounding the Affordable Care Act appear to agree on is that the US healthcare system is in need of significant reform (exactly what sort of reform is a subject of far more debate).

Cases like this are the sort of thing that not only give an entire industry a bad name, but make reasonable people wonder how much deeper, and broader, corporate fraud is in the health care and pharmaceutical industry. To what extent are other companies putting their own profits ahead of patient and consumer safety?

June 25, 2012

Oregon Child Injury Highlights Importance of Window Safety

by Matthew D. Kaplan

I have written in the past about the importance of window safety. Too many people forget at this time of year that screens are designed to keep bugs out, not to keep children in, and fail to take essential precautions.

This reminder is prompted by a recent report in The Oregonian about a Cedar Mill toddler who “was taken to a local hospital after she punched through a screen and fell from a second-storey window.” Even more frighteningly: “the girl reportedly fell from the window and first landed on a slanted roof. She then rolled off the roof and hit a mix of pavement and bark dust” the paper adds citing local Tualatin Valley first responders.

The child was taken to an area hospital and her injuries are reported not to be life-threatening.

May 23, 2012

Wrongful Death Suit Targets Oregon Company for Alaska Fatalities

by Matthew D. Kaplan

A lawsuit filed in Alaska by the grieving families of five fishermen targets an Oregon company for alleged wrongful death according to a report published yesterday in the Anchorage Daily News. Two of the five victims were also from Oregon, according to the newspaper.

The newspaper, quoting Alaska state troopers, reports that the five men drowned earlier this month when their “overloaded skiff swamped… in rough seas” near Cook Inlet, Alaska. The men were harvesting clams for the company. The suit says that the company “failed to train the men to pilot their aluminum skiff and neglected to provide proper safety equipment such as survival suits and two-way radios.” Notably, the newspaper says that when the men’s bodies were recovered only one of the five was wearing a life jacket. It adds that “the wrongful death suit claims the workers needed survival suits, not life vests, to survive in the Inlet,” referring to the cold seas off Alaska’s coast.

Tellingly, the paper reports that another worker told investigating troopers that he believed the boat was overloaded, particularly granted the windy conditions prevalent in the area, and refused to get aboard. Among the charges made in the suit is the claim that Clackamas-based Pacific Seafood did not give its workers sufficient training in “water-safety rules, emergency life-saving lessons or how many pounds of clams the skiff could safely carry.”