Articles Posted in Personal Injury

Each year, 9,400 children are injured in lawn mower accidents, and 7 percent of those injuries involve amputations or torn nerves, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. One-fifth of childhood amputations are caused by lawn mowers. Recently, an Ila, Georgia child lost her left leg below the knee and her right foot July 18, when her father accidentally ran over the child with a riding lawn mower. Unfortunately, this type of accident is becoming more prevalent in Georgia. Children’s Healthcare System of Atlanta, which includes Egleston and Scottish Rite, is treating three children who lost limbs in lawn mower accidents, according to Colleen Coulter-O’Berry, who’s worked in the system’s amputee program for 25 years. Nationwide, the estimated number of children with lawnmower related injuries, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics is 560 injuries to children each year.

A tragedy, yes. But don’t blame the parent. If the lawnmower had been equipped with a safety feature called the “no-mow-in-reverse” feature, this accident and thousands of others never would have happened. Trial lawyers across the United States are pursuing personal injury claims against the lawnmower manufacturers in product liability or product safety cases in an effort to make manufacturers equip their mowers with these safety devices. There have been mixed results, but one of the greatest accomplishments that some personal injury litigation can sometimes have is to force a manufacturer to make its product safe before selling it to the public, and I hope these lawnmower lawsuits will, ultimately, effect a change in that regard.

An easy solution would be for lawnmower manufacturers to fix their riding lawnmowers by including the “no-mow-in-reverse” safety feature. Then hundreds of Georgia kids would be spared a devastating injury such as losing a leg or a foot and then having to go through life disabled. I and other trial lawyers will continue to pursue these cases until these manufacturers listen and, hopefully, we’ll save a few Georgia children in the process.

The recent horrible tragedy of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Minnesota raises the question, and rightly so, of whether Georgia bridges are unsafe, also.

Unfortunately, the answer is probably “yes.” The Georgia Department of Transportation takes responsibility for inspecting roadway bridges throughout the state. It has a grading system of ranking the safety of Georgia bridges from 1-100, 1 being the least safe (or possibly dangerous) and 100 being the most safe. It might surprise many Georgia citizens to learn that 18 local bridges rated less than 10 on a 100-point scale were not closed and were listed as open in the federal database. Something is obviously wrong here. Many Georgia bridges are, apparently, unsafe, and yet remain open to use. This may have to do with a faulty rating system used by the Georgia DOT. Each bridge is rated on a 100-point scale. Those determined to be 50 or below are considered “structurally deficient.”

More than 1,100 roadway bridges in Georgia are in such bad shape that they need renovation or rebuilding, state and federal records show. Another 1,800 Georgia bridges are considered functionally obsolete: They aren’t designed to meet new standards. Nearly 500 of the problem bridges are in metro Atlanta. But while one in five Georgia bridges are considered by the government to be structurally deficient or functionally obsolete, the state Department of Transportation says no roads now open to traffic are unsafe for the vehicles that travel them. How can this be? Can Georgia citizens rely on what the Georgia DOT is telling us about the safety of our bridges? Or does Georgia have to experience something as utterly horrible and tragic as the Minneapolis bridge collapse before we get the Georgia DOT’s attention that something needs to be done to make Georgia bridges safe? And I don’t mean “safer”: I mean simply “safe.” Remember, this is the same Georgia DOT who immediately proclaimed nothing was wrong with its left-hand exit from I-75 at Northside Drive after the bus carrying the Bluffton, Ohio baseball team accidently drove up this exit and crashed off the overhead pass when the driver at last realized it was not the continuation of the bus lane on I-75.

I am not at all surprised to see that the fallout from the discovery that many Chinese manufactured toys are hazardous to children’s health continues. I am sure many of these hazardous toys have made their way to Georgia and Atlanta. Every day now it seems as if we learn of new toys from China that should not be bought for children because they pose a health threat to the children who would play with them. The latest such dangerous toys: sets of Essentials for Kids jewelry, 800 Mag Stix magnetic building sets and 68,000 Shape Sorting Toy Castles. These toys have now all been recalled by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. You can find a list of recalled toys by going to http://www.cpsc.gov.
I think it is probably a good idea to check on the USCPS’s list of recalled toys periodically, especially before buying for a birthday or Christmas. My friend and fellow Georgia Trial Lawyer, Don Keenan, also makes a point of including a list of dangerous toys on the Keenan Kids Foundation website, http://www.keenanskidsfoundation.com. Some of these toys were even manufactured right here in the United States. It is senseless that the practice of allowing foreign manufactured toys that can kill children continues. It is only a matter of time before one of these hazardous toys kills a precious child right here in Georgia.

I have just returned from a wonderful beach vacation over the Fourth of July Holiday, during which my two children swam every day in various swimming pools, and I am saddened and shocked to find out that another preventable swimming pool tragedy occurred during what was meant to be a fun summer week. This time the tragedy occurred in Minneapolis at a pool that we now know had some sort of defective drain in it. A six year old girl was eviscerated by the swimming pool drain while doing what normal six year olds are supposed to do in the summer…have fun swimming in a pool. As a mother of two, this news has hit me especially hard. I was under the impression that following several other lawsuits over such defective swimming pool drains and a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission warning in a 2005 report, Guidelines for Entrapment Hazards: Making Pools and Spas Safer, that every commercial pool in the United States had taken the necessary steps to make their pools safe. Also, that many pool owners, at least those in North Carolina, retrofitted their pools to make them safer after Presidential Candidate John Edwards successfully brought a lawsuit against a pool owner and drain manufacturer in an almost identical case in which his clients’ child was disemboweled by a defective pool drain. But, unfortunately, such was not the case, to this little six year old’s (and her parents’) horror. You can read more of the facts of this preventable tragedy here. Either the pool drain’s cover was carelessly off, or the pool had not been retrofitted with other drains to prevent too much suction power from being on this one drain. Either way, the owner of the pool was careless in allowing children to swim in a pool with a defective drain. Because of this carelessness, a young girl’s life is forever changed, to the point where she may have to be fed intravenously for the rest of her life.
Pool owners who fail to make their pools safe and pool drain manufacturers who fail to make safe swimming pool drains must be held accountable for their carelessness in our Civil Justice System. It will be the only justice this little girl will ever realize. Although such blatant corporate negligence really should be a crime. And this should never happen to another family ever again. I urge you to find out about the safety of the pool(s) in which your children are now swimming. Ask whether the pool has been retrofitted as suggested by the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Ask how often the owners check to insure all drains are covered. I am going to do so regarding the pools my children swim in. Demand that safety action be taken to correct any such dangerous situation as having a missing pool drain cover. The little Minneapolis six year old will be in my prayers.