It's not often that you'll find yourself on the highway without being in close proximity to commercial trucks. For this reason, you must have a clear idea of the steps you can take to properly share the road with these colossal vehicles.
While it's your hope that every trucker obeys the rules of the road, there's no way of knowing when someone will make a mistake or take a risk. Fortunately, when you're doing everything you can to avoid trouble, it's easier to remain safe.
A previous post on this blog described a tragic case in which a young child died at a California preschool program. While this happened at a public institution, the incident may raise concerns in the minds of many parents who drop their children off at one of the Bay Area's many child care facilities.
Fortunately, daycares in this state generally need to be licensed in order to operate legally. Along with the requirement to be licensed comes the obligation to follow a series of state regulations.
The parents of a three-year-old girl who died in a tragic accident while at her preschool have now sued both the preschool and the church that operated the school. The incident happened in Newark, an Alameda County suburb in the East Bay Area.
According to reports, the girl suffered a significant, and ultimately fatal, traumatic brain injury when the playset she was enjoying suddenly fell over on her. The weight of the structure also pinned her to the ground.
As this blog has reported before, the use of electric scooters in Alameda County and the rest of the Bay Area is showing no signs of slowing down. In fact, the trend is continuing to expand to other cities across the country. A recent study that appeared in a major medical journal, however, shows that safety issues with respect to these scooters continue as well. For example, 90 percent of those who got hurt because of an electric scooter were actually riding the vehicle, as opposed to being a pedestrian or other person in the vicinity. Of those riders, less than 5 percent were wearing a helmet at the time of the injury.
This is significant because 40 percent of the injuries reported involved a traumatic brain injury or other damage to the head or upper neck. The most serious injuries reported, in which the victim had to stay in intensive care, involved brain injuries.
As this blog has discussed before, even a mild brain injury will likely require some initial care and medical treatment. More severe brain injuries, like the kind that would put an Alameda County resident in a coma, may require long-term care or even rehabilitation that will last for the rest of the victim's life.
When it comes to more severe brain injuries, a patient may require a range of rehabilitation services. Usually, a person's psychiatrist or neurologist, a doctor who specializes in the structure and function of the brain, will head up the rehabilitation process.
When a car and commercial truck are involved in an accident, it's often at a high speed on the interstate. Furthermore, the size difference alone tends to put the people in the smaller vehicle at a disadvantage with them bearing the brunt of the worst injuries.
Knowing the many types of injuries you could suffer in a car-truck accident will help you receive the proper medical treatment in the event that you find yourself in this situation.
A previous post on this California blog talked about the elements of proving a negligence claim in a personal injury case, and specifically, a premises liability case. This post discussed how negligence is the ordinary standard, used in many different types of personal injury cases, judges or juries use to decide whether a party responsible for an accident will or will not have to pay compensation for an injury.
It is not always easy to prove negligence. While this is often the case even in motor vehicle accidents, it is particularly so in other contexts, like professional malpractice, premises liability and other, less common types of personal injury cases.
When one thinks of a bicycle accident in the Bay Area, one may envision a bicyclist getting hit by a car. Indeed, these are often very serious accidents, and they may even lead to a brain injury, even if the bicyclist involved was wearing a helmet.
However, residents of Alameda County need to remember that bicycles too can be hazardous to those with whom they share the road. For instance, if a bicyclist hits a pedestrian or another bicyclist, particularly if going at full speed, the chances are fairly good that the other person will suffer a significant injury.
If you have been injured while on a public premises, it is likely that you have suffered in many ways as a result. Any injury that requires medical care can become financially costly very quickly. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that the average cost of a fall is around $30,000.
However, many people who suffer as a result of a business owner's negligence fail to recoup these financial damages, as well as damages for the emotional suffering and physical pain. Sometimes, this is because a business owner tries to convince the victim that making a legal claim would be unsuccessful. It is important that you do not automatically trust the advice of someone guarding one's own interests, and that you take time to understand how the law works in California.
This blog has previously discussed, in a variety of contexts, how an injured victim of an accident in the Bay Area, including Alameda County, can hold a responsible party financially accountable for her injuries if she can prove negligence.
In common parlance, negligence simply implies carelessness or thoughtlessness, but in the world of law, it is a term of art, a shorthand way of saying that four legal elements exist in combination such that a victim may get an order from a court requiring someone else to pay compensation.
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