Car Rear-ends Hayride, Twelve Injured
One of the great things about the fall season for many people is the prospect of going on a hayride, which is usually accomplished by decorating an open-bed truck or wagon with an assemblage of farm-related objects such as hay, corn stalks, or pumpkins and letting people ride around in it for one reason or another.
Hayrides are organized for various reasons. Often around Halloween, people will go on “haunted hayrides” that serve the primary purpose of trying to scare the hayride enthusiasts. Although they were not taking part in a haunted hayride, several hayride-goers from Stanley, Virginia recently got a scare of their own at about 8 p.m. on Tuesday when a vehicle rear-ended their horse-drawn wagon, causing the horses to spook and drag the wagon another 100 yards before it crashed into an electric pole. In all, about a dozen people were hurt in the incident, with one being airlifted to the hospital with a broken leg and four others sent to hospitals with various injuries.
Hayrides are a fairly popular fall and holiday tradition and as such drivers need to be on the lookout for them at all times during the holiday season. While it would seem hard to miss a huge wagon with twenty people in it being pulled by multiple horses, hayrides are often conducted at dark and can be hard to spot if one is not being particularly careful. While a hayride may not have proper reflective devices installed to help motorists recognize that it is in the road, drivers can still be found liable for rear-ending a wagon or truck that is playing host to a hayride.
The biggest source of liability in such a situation is obviously the fact that a driver who wrecks into such a contraption could be held responsible for injuring twenty or so people who are not properly restrained and may be subjected to serious injuries. Given the nature of the hayride (the fact that participants are not buckled in) and the fact that they can be hard to notice on the roadways at first, drivers should be exceedingly careful and keep a proper lookout for hayrides and other such obstacles in the roadway.
Source: http://www.wbir.com/news/national/story.aspx?storyid=108001&catid=16
