Atlanta Injury Lawyer Blog

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.

Posted by Robin Frazer Clark | Permalink | Email This Post

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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.

Georgia citizens deserve better. I hope that the Georgia Legislature will act during the next General Assembly in 2008 to require the Georgia DOT to revamp their bridge "inspection" procedures and to require better maintenance of our Georgia bridges. The loss of one precious life in Georgia is too steep a price to pay to allow the Georgia DOT to remain careless and clueless about the situation. After the bridge collapse in Minneapolis, Minnesota State Legislators immediately called for better inspection procedures of all bridges. Our Georgia Legislator should do likewise.

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Posted by Robin Frazer Clark | Permalink | Email This Post

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The loss of a child saddens me and it is especially tough when the child's death was preventable. In the last two weeks, children in two separate incidents were killed when they were run over by one of their parents who was driving an SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle). The first incident, in Savannah, Georgia, involved a mother who ran over her twenty month old daughter as she backed up in her Isuzu Ascension, an SUV. To read more of that horrible story, click here.http://www.ajc.com/search/content/metro/stories/2007/07/20/toddlerkilled.html Then I see today that in Ohio, a father backed over his own child yesterday while heading out to church. This father was driving a Chevrolet Suburban. For more on this tragedy, click here. http://www.wlwt.com/news/13778230/detail.html

I am willing to bet that neither the Chevrolet Suburban nor the Isuzu Ascension had a back-up camera in them, which easily allows an SUV driver to see what is behind the car before backing up. In fact, this type of camera automatically comes on anytime the vehicle is in reverse. Also, they are cheap, costing only approximately $150.00. These back-up cameras are crucial in SUVs, in which the driver is sitting so high off the ground and the SUV is so long that it is almost impossible to see everything behind the SUV clearly. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in a report to Congress in November, said backover accidents are not a recent phenomenon. But NHTSA disputes perceptions that the number of accidents is increasing as the size of the nation’s vehicle fleet grows — led by SUVs and minivans, which tend to have larger rear blind zones.

A study by Consumer Reports magazine suggests SUVs, pickups and minivans are longer and taller and their blind zones extend as much as 50 feet from the rear bumper. These factors contribute to poor visibility, the report says.

Back-up cameras would have prevented both of these tragic deaths.

Something obviously needs to be done. The statistics are alarming: 1,200 children under 15 who have been killed since 2000 in nontraffic motor-vehicle accidents in the United States. Half of those fatalities were in backovers, almost all of them involving children under 5, according to Kids and Cars, a child-safety advocacy group in Leawood, Kan.http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/64616.html

What is $150.00 if it will save the life of a child? A child's life is priceless. It is time Congress mandated the inclusion of these inexpensive, but absolutely life-saving, back-up cameras in all new SUVs before another child dies needlessly, and another family is tortured with the guilt of running over their own child. Enough is enough.

Continue reading "Georgia Children Are Dying From Defective SUV's That Lack Back-up Cameras" »

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