Posts Tagged ‘accidents’

Have you been injured in an accident? Generally, you only have two years from the date of the accident to file a personal injury claim. It is important that you contact a lawyer right away so as not to miss your opportunity to recover compensation for your injuries.

However, there are some exceptions to this rule. In this month’s video blog, Attorney Dean Weitzman of MyPhillyLawyer explains the exceptions to the general statute of limitations and who they apply to.

Two carriage drivers were sent to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital with serious injuries on Monday morning following a car accident,on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. The accident occurred at around 10 a.m. when an elderly driver crashed his car into the back of a horse-drawn carriage — one of several stopped at a red light.

The car’s impact forced the carriage across the street, toppling two more carriages in front of it. A number of the horses broke free and bolted, before they were calmed down by passersby. Though scared, scraped and bruised, none of the horses were seriously injured.

However, two carriage drivers suffered serious damage, including head injuries, though both are currently in stable condition and expected to recover. The 70-year-old car driver was also taken to the hospital following the car accident, but has not yet been charged.

The crash sparked renewed calls for carriage bans from the Peace Advocacy Network (PAN), a Philadelphia-based activist group that focuses most of its energy on promoting veganism and animal rights. PAN has long been opposed to Philadelphia’s horse-drawn carriage industry and Monday’s car accident simply added fuel to their fire.

PAN members have already announced plans for a Saturday protest.

While refraining from comment on the animal rights side of the story, it’s worth taking a closer look at services like horse-drawn carriages and asking whether they really belong on today’s city streets. As Monday’s accident showed, it can be very dangerous to carriage drivers — not to mention the horses. Even if you don’t agree with PAN’s morals, it’s hard to fault them for wishing the animals safe conduct on city streets.

Additionally, imagine the outcome if those three carriages had been carrying passengers. Surely, there would have been more injuries. While driver error appears to be the sole cause of this accident, it makes little difference to the individual who has already suffered brain damage or another severe injury.

Dangerous drivers pose a threat to all of us, but the threat is even greater for those traveling by horse-drawn carriage — without any sort of protection. Certainly, you could argue that the danger posed to horse-drawn carriages is no worse than that posed to bikers and pedestrians, and, to be sure, that is a valid point.

But how many variables do we want out there on Philadelphia streets? It’s not an easy question, but one worth considering.

Read the full article here.

Twice in the last three months, Philadelphia-area law enforcement officers have been involved in off-duty vehicle accidents that allegedly involve driving under the influence of alcohol.

For law enforcement officers, who absolutely, positively must be accountable to a higher standard than the people they are sworn to protect, that is unacceptable.

Last month, a 23-year-old off-duty Philadelphia Police officer was driving north on I-95 near Girard Avenue when his vehicle crashed into the rear of a state police car while two state troopers were assisting a tow truck driver who was preparing to remove an abandoned car, according to a story in The Philadelphia Inquirer. The two troopers and the two truck driver sustained injuries and the off-duty city officer was being investigated for DUI and was placed on desk duty.

Image credit: © iStockphoto.com/ftwitty

In January, a 47-year-old, Philadelphia-based DUI expert and corporal for the Pennsylvania State Police was charged with drunken driving, careless driving and an open container violation in connection with an accident Dec. 17 when his car struck a guardrail on Route 422, according to a story in the Philadelphia Daily News. He was placed on administrative leave while the incident was being investigated.

We know that police officers are human like the rest of us and that this doesn’t only occur here in Philadelphia, but individual law enforcement agencies across the nation must work harder to stop this problem, and quickly.

It’s bad enough being involved in a vehicle accident. What makes it even worse is if you are hit by a vehicle driven by a drunken police officer, who is supposed to be out there protecting us all – even if they are “off-duty.”

We need to have effective alcohol treatment programs to help law enforcement officers who have drinking problems. And deny it or not, if they are driving drunk, they have drinking problems.

We need to have better mechanisms inside police departments to help officers who are showing signs of such problems. That means counseling programs, rehab programs and other support for officers who are troubled.

Yes, police work is an incredibly stressful, often violent and difficult job, but overconsumption of alcohol and illegal drugs is not the answer.

We need to help officers who are having these kinds of problems and encourage better, more productive coping mechanisms.

Law enforcement officers, as part of their jobs and responsibilities, automatically must live up to this higher standard of behavior because we give them the powers to watch over us if we behave in such irresponsible ways. There is no credibility in the legal system if law enforcement officers can be arrested for drunken driving one day and then arrest any of us and charge us with drunken driving on a different day.

It’s bad enough when you are injured in an accident and then have to wait for a monetary settlement or verdict to compensate you for your injuries.

It’s even worse if you are victimized a second time by one of the many companies out there that are cashing in on the anticipated cash settlements of injured people by “loaning” them money up front and then taking huge windfalls from the settlements when the money is finally received.

When times get tough and predatory lenders are circling, you’ve got to watch out for yourself even more carefully.

High interest rates from settlement cash advance companies can be astronomical, leaving accident victims with far less money from their settlements than they anticipated. Image credit: © iStockphoto.com/ArchMen

These so-called cash advances on pending settlements look like a good thing because they can provide you with cash when you need it most after an injury. Then the companies reassure you that all will be OK because if you end up not receiving a settlement, you will owe them nothing.

The real problems come from the terms of the so-called cash advances, which usually carry incredibly high interest rates that have to be paid by the injury victim.  So if you are expecting a $15,000 settlement for your case, and your attorney receives $6,000 plus $1,000 for costs related to the case, your settlement comes in at about $8,000.  If you borrowed a few thousand dollars against that $8,000 balance with a settlement cash advance business, then you may have to pay them as much as $5,000 or more after their astronomical interest rates are figured in, leaving you only about $3,000 from the original settlement.

That’s just not fair to accident victims.

The better thing to do is to be patient and wait for the settlement to happen naturally, so you don’t lose a substantial part of the money to a cash advance scam.

I think this predatory practice by settlement cash advance companies is getting out of hand and accident victims need to be very aware of what they are getting involved in if making such a deal.

In fact, such settlement cash advance arrangements can also make it more complicated for your attorney to settle a case because there’s now a pending claim on part of the money before it’s ever received. And worse, accident victims then can feel victimized again when they learn how much they will lose to one of these companies once the bill comes due for the cash advance.

Yes, there are times when such an arrangement can be beneficial for an accident victim — such as when they have $30,000 in outstanding bills and are awaiting a large settlement of $1 million or more. In such  a case, there would not be a huge impact on the remaining funds once the cash advance loan was repaid. But since the typical accident settlement is more in the $15,000 range, the impact is much more severe once those loan fees start racking up for unsuspecting accident victims.

These companies are pandering to people who are desperate and who don’t really have the wherewithal to accurately measure the costs involved if they accept the settlement loans.

Our advice is to steer clear of such offers and keep your settlement for your needs and the needs of your family. Don’t do something that will make you feel victimized again.

As your attorneys, we are here to help you every step of the way with your case.

If you need anything, talk to us and let us continue to try to help you while your case is being moved forward.

At MyPhillyLawyer.com, that is our promise to you.

Can you explain what caused your slip and fall accident? If not, you may not be able to recover compensation for your injuries.

In this video blog from MyPhillyLawyer.com, Attorney Dean Weitzman explains the importance of identifying the cause and responsible party for your trip, slip and fall accident. He assures that the attorneys of Silvers, Langsam & Weitzman will help you with the discovery process and with filing a successful claim.

Fueled by the goal of drastically cutting their expensive electricity bills, cash-strapped municipal governments around the United States have been changing over from traditional light bulbs to new energy-saving light-emitting diodes (LEDs) in traffic lights at thousands of intersections.  But unlike “impact studies” that often have to be done for zoning, planning and road construction projects, no one seemed to think twice about the impacts of such a move.

Yes, it saves plenty of energy to move from incandescent light bulbs to LEDs, but an unforeseen problem has arisen in states where winter means ice, snow and sleet — the new LED bulbs don’t give off resulting heat that in the past has melted snow and ice from the fixtures so frozen precipitation doesn’t block the critical signal lights from the view of  drivers.  Can you imagine pulling up to a traffic light that you can’t see because the red, yellow and green lamps are covered over by snow and ice?  What in the world are you supposed to do?

This type of traffic light with traditional incandescent light bulbs uses more energy but also melts collecting ice and snow during the winter months so the lights aren't accidentally blocked by precipitation. Image credit: © iStockphoto.com/inhauscreative

Tragically, vehicle accidents have started occurring across the nation as a result of the cool-running LED traffic lights,  according to a news story last week in The New York Times.  Road crews in Wisconsin are having to use brushes to manually clear snow and ice from LED traffic lights this winter, the story said, and some signals are being fitted with special shields that are sloped to allow collecting snow and ice to fall away from the lights.  One traffic accident near Chicago last April left a woman motorist dead when her car was struck by a pickup truck in an intersection due to a red light that was apparently blocked by snow, according to the Times. Four people in the pickup were injured in the crash.

The problem is that this is the kind of thing that can happen when government agencies do things in a vacuum without really taking a good, hard look at what they are doing.  That would include things like recommending a knee-jerk move to LED lights under the guise of energy savings without looking at any other factors.  Knee-jerk reactions are often a government strategy, and that’s not good planning.

This is a great example of why governments and their agencies  need to thinking more often with a team mentality.  Governments need to gather engineers, lawyers, and other specialists before enacting changes that can have fatal consequences.  Politicians too often buy into their own talking points and then convince themselves that  they know more than the engineers and specialists do.  They make decisions without using the experts who can advise them.  Did anyone ask traffic engineers about using LEDs to see if they would have raised issues about snow and ice and LEDs?  Perhaps not.

Maybe the LEDs are the greatest thing since sliced bread because they save energy, last longer and are brighter than incandescent bulbs, but the point is that such decisions should be made with all the gathered information at a government’s disposal.

In the meantime, energy-efficient LED traffic signals are one more potential hazard that drivers have to deal with as they cope with snow and ice this winter in cold climates such as Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

Let’s be careful out there.