Personal Injury Attorneys - Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and the Bronx

Over the past seven years, 109 children have been injured in elevator and escalator incidents in the City, including one fatal accident in 2008. In an effort to prevent injuries, since 2004, inspectors from the New York City Buildings Departments Elevators Unit have taught thousands of students how to safely ride the Citys 60,000 elevators and 2,200 escalators and what to do in the event of an emergency. This week, inspectors will be providing critical safety tips to more than 2,300 first, second and third graders in 16 schools throughout the Citys five boroughs. For the first time since the Departments annual educational prog

Ive wondered about this. Beforethe law changed in 2003 and in most cases made abutting property owners, rather than the Cityof New York,responsible to those injured on sidewalks, Iwouldexplain to clients whohad fallen on a public sidewalk in the City that the City would not be liable (assuming it did not create the condition) unless it had received prior written notice of the defect,clients would ask Who would do that? Clients were happy to hear the answer: The Big Apple Sidewalk and Pothole Protection Corp. which prepared and filed maps showing the locations of sidewalk defects. But when the law changed, Big Apple stopped filing the maps. Current accidents where liability against th

New York Citys fire trucks collided with other vehicles and with one another nearly 700 times last year. In an attempt to increase safety for firefighters and civilians by reducing the number of accidents caused while responding to non-fire and non-life threatening emergencies the New York City Fire Department is implementing a 3-month Modified Response pilot program in Queens effective October 4, 2010. The new protocol increases the instances where the either none or at most one first-due units will respond at a reduced speed and obey all traffic regulations. All-out emergency responses will still apply for fires and medical calls. It is hoped that the new protocol will reduce the number of fire apparatus responses using lights and sirens to non-fire and non-life threatening emergencies citywide by more than 300,000 annually - a 30 percent reduction since FDNY apparatus respond

We've returned from Japan and notice other differences concerning safetybesides the seat belt requirement in motor buses. For one thing, at every construction site there was one and sometimes two men in official looking outfits that somewhat resembled police uniforms, wearing helmets, standing on the street or on the sidewalk to direct vehicular and pedestrian traffic.They were there even if nothing going on inside the work-site appeared to be effecting the street or sidewalk. Although I've noticed workers on 0ccasion positioned at an entrance to a construction site, they only seem present when something directly affecting the adjacent sidewalk or roadway is going on, and they wear the regular a

Last week we posted a blog discussing the U.S. Department of Transportation proposal requiring seat belts in buses to attempt to reduce bus accident fatalities. Coincidentally, I'm in Japan on a tour bus equipped with a seat belt. In and of itself barely noteworthy, except that as we're about to enter a highway, the tour guide announced that everyone should put on their seatbelt. Apparently, in Japan wearing a seatbelt on a bus that is travelling on a highway is required. We're now buckled up on a bus taking us to a Ninja Museum. Supposedly there are real ninjas there, wearing pink day-glow outfits. My kids can't wait. Sayonara

Motorcoaches carry 750 million passengers annually in the U.S. An average of 19 motorcoach occupants are killed each year on U.S. roadways. Ejections account for seventy-eight percent of the fatalities in motorcoach rollover crashes and twenty-eight percent of the fatalities in non-rollover crashes. Wearing lap-shoulder belts on motorcoaches could reduce the risk for passengers of being killed in a rollover crash by 77 percent, primarily by preventing occupant ejection in a crash, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Motorcoach rollover crashes, while relatively rare, can cause a significant number of fatal or serious injuries in a single event. Citing these facts

In 1910, the City of New York began collecting data to determine traffic fatalities among NYC pedestrians. Nearly a century later, in 2009, pedestrian fatalities are at its lowest rate in New York City history, down by 35% from 2001. The New York City Department of Transportation is undertaking an ambitious task to reduce by half the number of traffic deaths by 2030, to do this, the agency has collected and analyzed data about the causes of traffic deaths and injuries and where they are happening, using this information to design better streets. This landmark study, Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, worked to identify the causes, common factors, and geographic distribution of over 7,000 pedestrian crashes in New York City. So far, the study has found that NYCs traffic fatality rate

Last summer Nassau County on Long Island initiated a red-light camera program, with cameras placed above intersections to videotape motor vehicles running red lights and making right turns on red without coming to a full stop. $50 tickets are then sent to the vehicles owners. In its first year the program has generated more that $10 million from nearly 260,000 violations 1 for every 5 county residents and more than $13 million is expected in the year 2010. However, although the purpose of the cameras is to reduce motor vehicle accidents by placing them at high-accident intersections, questions are being raised whether the cameras have been placed at high-traffic intersections instead. The legislation approving the red-light cameras required that a report analyzing the proper placement of the camera

The New York State Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) and the Chair of the Governor's Traffic Safety Committee (GTSC) announced that preliminary crash data from 2009 indicates a more than six percent decrease in overall traffic fatalities, a more than seventeen percent decrease in motorcycle fatalities and a more than twenty-nine percent decrease in bicycle fatalities. Alcohol, however, was a contributing factor in 30 percent of all fatal crashes. Preliminary crash data for 2009 indicates the total number of traffic fatalities decreased from 1,224 in 2008 to 1,146 in 2009. Additionally, data from the DMV shows that in 2009 motorcycle fatalities went from 188 to 155, and bicycle fatalities went from 42 to 2

Devadas v. Niksarli, Index #: 107637/07, is an action for medical malpractice and lack of informed consent with respect to LASIK eye surgery. It was alleged that the defendant departed from the accepted standard of care for refractive surgeons inasmuch as the eye surgery was contraindicated in that at the time of the surgery the plaintiff suffered from forme fruste keratoconus, an early stage of keratoconus. Keratoconus is the non-inflammatory thinning and steepening of the cornea. The presence of forme fruste keratoconus weakens the corneal stroma and can lead to iatrogenic ectasia. (the word iatrogenic roughly translated means the doctor did it.) Ectasia, a bulging of the cornea, is also called iatrogenic ker