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A Floyd County Georgia woman was killed on I-75 in a collision with a tractor trailer while she was trying to change her tire. According to this article by Kim Sloan, Help Sought in Fatal Accident” the Serious Collision Reconstruction Team of the Georgia State Patrol is looking for eyewitnesses to the incident.Courtney Adcock, of Shannon, Georgia near Rome, Georgia was struck and killed by a passing tractor trailer in Whitfield County while helping a friend with a disabled vehicle on the highway at at night. The SCRT unit investigates all fatal accidents on state roads and they do an excellent job of examining the evidence to determine if the trucker was at fault for the collision. In this one, it sounds like they have not made a determination of blame yet and that is the reason for the search for eyewitnesses.

When I was defending tractor trailer companies, fully 30% of the fatal incidents I looked into had to do with disabled vehicles on the side of the road. Although it may seem obvious, many people with blown tires and other mechanical troubles chose to work on their vehicles or stay in their cars with tractor trailers whizzing by at 70 miles per hour and that is a terrible risk to run. The physics of an impact over 45 miles per hour are often fatal as passenger vehicles and SUVs are unable to absorb that kind of energy, especially when the mass moving at those speeds or above is close to the 80,000lb weight of many tractor trailers.

My plea to my readers is this; if something goes wrong with your car, do not stay with it on the side of the interstate. Gather your family and move as far off the roadway as possible and then call for help. The risks of staying next to a lane of travel are astronomical and please don’t even think of trying to change a tire on the interstate. Risking your life to save a $50.00 tire change fee with a wrecker service is a bad way to save money. I would rather go broke for lack of clients than see another senselessly wasted life. These accidents can be avoided with a little common sense.

As an injury lawyer, I am constantly litigating car accident cases where the insurance company disputes liability and tries to scare off the injured party. This often leads to the litigation of “swearing contest” cases where there are no eyewitnesses and the jury is left to judge the credibility of the parties without further aid. What is odd about this predicament is that there are increasing numbers of cameras and yet it is very difficult to get the police and DOT to produce the records.

As any Atlanta motorist knows, there are a series of video cameras covering not only all major highways, but increasingly we are seeing video and still cameras at major intersections. Through the years, I have sent Open Records Requests and Subpoenas and the response has been “we don’t record that information.” The lack of access to those videos leads to needless litigation by both sides to the dispute. There are situations where the trucking company was clearly in the wrong but litigated the case because of the chance that a jury would see it their way and when I was defending insurance companies, I handled many a case where the passenger car driver was clearly at fault and the video would have exonerated the tractor trailer driver.

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I ran across this editorial on an Albany Georgia television site about dog bites and vicious dog attacks. The author tackled a difficult issue: what controls should there be on the ownership of certain breeds of dogs including Pitt Bulls, Dobermans and some strains of German Shepherd. As a dog bite lawyer, I have litigated enough cases to know that some of those breeds can be very aggressive to humans and can cause serious injuries when they are. According to the article, there are a number of States that are considering a ban on certain breeds.

The most interesting proposal on the piece is the bond proposal and I will tell you why it is meritorious. I have a client that was in his own yard when he was attacked by the neighbor down the road’s unrestrained Pit Bull. The County where the attack occurred had leash laws and the owner was clearly in the wrong. The problem is, the owner had allegedly allowed their homeowner’s insurance to lapse. We are now litigating that issue in Court but it appears that there will be no insurance to cover the matter. It is frustrating to watch someone’s life turned on its ear because another Georgian ignored the leash laws.

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The number of bike riders in Buckhead and the Metro Atlanta area is increasing and so is the number of riders being hit by cars. As I was mulling over whether to ride my 10 year old Mongoose Trail Bike to work to help the environment, I ran across this Atlanta Journal Constitution article by Thomas Stinson entitled “Rookie and rusty cyclists hit streets … and hospitals” published in late July. Mr. Stinson profiles a local rider that ended up with both elbows being fractured for his efforts at reducing his carbon signature.

All joking aside, bike riders have long know that Atlanta traffic is notoriously unfriendly to riders. There are very few dedicated lanes and none on the major thoroughfares. When I was a younger lawyer, I used to ride from Midtown Atlanta down to the Public Defenders office on Peachtree Street downtown and remember getting nailed by several errant motorists. The only long term cure to the problem is oddly, more cyclists. The more common the practice is, the better motorists will be at avoiding collisions with them.

As you might imagine, injuries are way up due to the flood of riders. The best thing you can do as a rider is to wear your helmet, ride in the daylight and make sure that your Atlanta uninsured motorist lawyer is on par with your liability coverage. If you are hit by a car while riding your bike in Atlanta, Marietta or Sandy Springs and you suffer from an injury, be sure you work with an attorney that has handled bicycling cases before as their are nuances to them that a generic lawyer will not appreciate.

I was saddened another pointless loss of life caused by a tractor trailer crash. Here, the family was struck when the tractor trailer crashed into them after cresting a hill. This article details the sad outcome of this collision on Friday. In the unattributed article in the local paper, it states that the trucker crested a hill on a rural highway and plowed into several vehicles, also striking a grandmother standing on the side of the road to walk her grandchildren home.

What infuriates me about this is how preventable this collision was. Georgia tractor trailer drivers operate on these roads on a daily basis and know exactly what time of day school buses pass through the area. They should know better than to come flying over a hill top. That area frequently has slow moving farm equipment, not to mention school buses. We can only hope that the trucker has his license revoked and the injured heal up. Lawyers that deal with trucking cases can only shake their heads in knowing sadness because we see the same inattention leading to tragedy again and again.

I am going to be producing a series of video observations on handling certain aspects of casualty claims over the next few months. Here is the first of them.

The regulations on the number of hours a commercial truck driver can drive have been changed twice over the last 5 years but unfortunately Georgia drivers are continuing to die and suffer catastrophic injuries as a result of tired tractor trailer drivers in Atlanta. The most recent study from 2005 shows that nationally 5,212 died as a result of tractor trailer collisions. When the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration revised the rules drastically in December 2003, they sold it to the public as a safety improvement but in reality it allows truckers to driver for 11 hours straight before having to take 10 hours off! I don’t know about you but I cannot maintain my focus driving for even 7 hours before I have to take an entire day off and here the government is authorizing 11 hours.

To make matters worse, the government continues to play with their numbers and in December 2007, the FMCSA released a statement saying that despite the increase in hours since 2003, deaths per mile were down. The problem with that claim is the fact that they started counting the miles driven by passenger buses, which don’t make long hauls like truckers do. This had the effect of diluting the fatality numbers and making them look better.

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A five year old boy was mauled by a stray dog in Dalton Georgia and it could have been prevented. Unfortunately more and more people are buying Pit Bulls, Dobermans and cross-bred Chau dogs. These dogs can be fine when well trained and restrained but they can be very aggressive with small children.

The problems arise when dog owners either don’t take the time to train their dogs or, even worse, ignore and abuse their own dogs. Those dogs become aggressive and pose a serious threat to the public. Most counties and cities require that a dog be kept on leash, on a chain or confined by a fence at all times. In Georgia, if a dog attacks a human and a Plaintiff comes before the Court to hold the owner liable, the Court will inquire as to whether 1) there were prior indications that the dog was aggressive towards humans and if not; 2) whether the owner was in violation of the leash and restraint laws at the time of the attack. Either avenue can support a potential liability claim against a homeowner.

According to the article “Boy mauled by dog” written by reporter Kim Sloan with the Dalton Daily Citizen, Murray County Animal Control had been called several times and failed to take any action at all. This is a serious injury that could have been averted and now will leave the child scarred for life.

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It is stunning how often Georgia tractor trailer drivers fall asleep or pass out due to medical conditions while driving heavy commercial vehicles on Georgia roads. In a shocking AP story out this past week, the service revealed that hundreds of thousands of drivers with commercial driver’s licenses (CDLs) also are qualified as medically disabled. As an Athens injury lawyer and a former trucking defense lawyer, one of the things that I am acutely aware of is the fact that the Federal Motor Carrier Safety regulations include a requirement that the employer require a strict annual checkup that is supposed to screen out drivers that have dangerous health conditions like severe high blood pressure, diabetes and epilepsy.

The problem is that enforcement is lax. According the article the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration has not completed any of the Congressional recommendations made in 2001 to enhance enforcement. Unfortunately Georgia was listed as one of 12 states that are responsible for more than half of the violations.

The end result of this is that there are unhealthy truckers and bus drivers operating 80,000 pound vehicles on our roads. When dealing with an injury or death case, be sure to consult with an Atlanta trucking injury lawyer before discussing the situation with the insurance company for the trucking company.

A DOT worker was killed in Augusta Georgia this week when a 200 pound tire flew off of a tractor trailer and struck the man. What concerns me is that the news service calls this a “freak accident” and yet it clearly is not. The only way wheels come off is if the lug nuts are not secured or the axle is horribly out of balance. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety regulations require detailed pre-trip inspections and there are also regular maintenance requirements that should have spotted this. The sections of the Regulations pertaining to the duty to maintain and inspect the vehicle are very strict and this problem would have been spotted in a thorough pre-trip inspection. In short, this did not have to happen. DOT workers have a very dangerous job and it saddens me to see that the investigating officers appear to have shrugged this death off as a pure accident.

In the article “Flying tire kills man in freak accident in Augusta” by reporter Navideh Forghani, he desribes poignantly how the man was spray painting a line up until the second he was struck, leaving behind a timeline leading up to his death.

I am incensed at some of the blog posts after the article that focus solely on the immigration status of the decesed. Ask yourself this question…If the wheel came off and struck a four year old little girl in her family car, how would you feel about it? Is there a difference and why?