Beginning June 23, 2008, OSHA brought a dozen additional inspectors into New York City to conduct proactive inspections of high-rise construction sites, cranes, and other places, where fatalities and serious accidents have been occurring. In January through June of this year, 20 employees died in construction-related accidents. Perhaps the most notorious incidents involved the 2 crane collapses, one on March 10 and the other on May 30, in which not only employees were killed, but also non-workers who were in the wrong place at the wrong time were killed or injured, to say nothing about the extensive property damage sustained. (more…)

After hearing about Robert Novak’s accident this past week when his Corvette (with the top down) struck a pedestrian, we thought that it would be interesting to note some of the statistics contained in last month’s National Pedestrian Crash Report released by the National Center for Statistics and Analysis, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The report analyzed trends in pedestrian fatalities and police-reported motor vehicle crashes involving a pedesrian in the United States between 1997 and 2006. Pedestrian fatalities declined slowly between 1997 and 2006. However, while the probability of a pedestrian crash declined, the probability of a pedestrian fatality in a crash increased. (more…)

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak was involved in a motor vehicle accident yesterday when his black Chevrolet Corvette struck a pedestrian who was crossing a street while crossing with a “Walk” signal within a crosswalk. Novak did not stop at the scene of accident but continued driving. He claims that he did not realize what happened until he had traveled one block and a bicyclist stopped him to tell him he had struck someone. Luckily for the injured pedestrian, a bicyclist witnessed the accident and reportedly said that the pedestrian was splayed across Novak’s windshield. (more…)

Every online picture has a unique “Hash Value” that, once identified and collected, can be used to digitally match the same image anywhere else it is distributed. It is analagous to a fingerprint. As part of an undercover investigation, the New York State Attorney General’s office built a library of the Hash Values for images identified as being child pornography, enabling investigators to filter through tens of thousands of online files at a time, speedily identifying which Internet Service Providers were providing access to child pornography images. This led to five of the world’s largest Internet Service Providers (”ISPs”), AT&T, AOL, Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint to reach an agreement with the New York State Attorney General’s office to shut down major sources of online child pornography.  (more…)

Summer always seems to fill newspapers and news reports with heart wrenching stories of young children drowning in their family’s or a neighbor’s swimming pool. On Long Island through July 14 of this year there have been six residential swimming pool drownings, including three children younger than 4. Accidental drownings in swimming pools and spas are most commonly caused by falling into an unsupervised pool or by the child being entrapped by a drain/suction outlet. Both New York State and the federal government have recently passed important swimming pool and spa safety laws, violations of which can be used to help establish negligence in a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit. (more…)

The Special Crash Investigations unit of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has, since October 2006, been collecting detailed data on backover and non-crash events to support the agency’s efforts to mitigate these kinds of incidents. The types of cases investigated include: Backover; backing-up light passenger vehicle strikes a person from the rear or approaching from the side; certified advanced-air-bag cases; school bus crashworthiness investigations; rollaway; vehicle slips out of gear and injures a nonoccupant; carbon monoxide poisoning; vehicles with adaptive vehicle controls; not-in-transport cases; and other vehicle safety issues as requested by the agency.

The focus is on children in situations such as the following: (more…)

The state Department of Transportation yesterday unveiled changes to a stretch of Jericho Turnpike, from Old Willets Path to Meadow Road, in Smithtown where three teenagers were killed last year in a car accident on their lunch break from school. A primary purpose of the changes is to slow drivers down by reconfiguring the roadway and by reducing the speed limit. Although the posted speed limit is 55 MPH, New York State Department of Transportation (DOT) studies show 50 percent of drivers in the westbound lane drive 60 mph or faster. The speed on the westbound lane will be reduced from 55 MPH to 45 MPH, and on the eastbound lanes from 55 MPH to 50 MPH. Police will also increase speed enforcement. (more…)

According to the medical records of the psychiatric emergency room at Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn, New York, a patient named Esmin Elizabeth Green, who had been brought to the hospital almost 24 hours earlier but had not yet been seen by a doctor, was sitting quietly in a chair. In fact, she was already dead. The hospital chart also says that she got up to walk to the bathroom when she was actually writhing on the floor. How do we know the truth? Because unlike most instances of medical malpractice, this apparent fiasco is captured on the hospital’s own surveillance videotape. (more…)

Golf carts have become much faster and more powerful – some can reach 25 mph and travel over 40 miles on a single battery charge. Golf carts are now routinely used for transportation purposes at sporting events, hospitals, airports, national parks, college campuses, businesses and military bases. In many gated and retirement communities, golf carts have become the primary means of transportation. According to a study published in the July 2008 issue of The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, from 1990 until 2006, nearly 150,000 people, as young as 2 months and as old as 96 years, were injured in golf cart-related accidents. The number of golf cart–related injuries increased more than 130 percent over that period, from an estimated 5772 cases in 1990 to an estimated 13,411 cases in 2006. (more…)

The 2008 report of the New York City Child Fatality Review Team (CFRT) looks retrospectively at injury deaths for the years 2001 through 2006 for New York City children aged 1 to 12 years. The single largest contributor to child injury deaths overall and to unintentional deaths are motor vehicle accidents, especially those involving child pedestrians. Fire and burn-related deaths were the second leading contributor to unintentional injury deaths and the leading contributor to fatal child injuries in the home. (more…)