Tennessee Injury Lawyer Blog

At least eleven people were reportedly killed when a tractor-trailer crossed over the median on Interstate 65 near Munfordville, Kentucky and crashed head-on into a van carrying several men, women, and children. The truck then went on to smash into a rock wall, bursting into flames and killing the driver. The rest of those killed were apparently passengers inside the van. Miraculously, two children were able to survive the crash but no word is given in the article as to their condition. The wreck apparently occurred on a stretch of highway that is treacherous because it narrows from three lanes down to two as the highway leads into Hart County, Kentucky.

This is a tragic situation, and it is also one where multiple parties may bear some sort of responsibility. There has been no cause of the wreck determined according to the article, but it is obvious from looking at the circumstances that the driver of the tractor-trailer would be responsible for the injuries and damages suffered by those killed and their families if he was behaving negligently at the time of the crash, which includes failing to drive appropriately where the road bottle-necks into two lanes. Depending on the circumstances, the company that owns the tractor-trailer may also be responsible, especially if the driver had a bad driving history or they knew for some reason that he should not be operating a tractor-trailer.

Continue reading " Almost a Dozen Killed in Highway Crash " »

As discussed in this site’s previous blog article, drivers can often look to the Tennessee Code in order to determine what types of driving behavior are likely to be considered negligent should the driver engage in such behavior and injure someone, leading to a personal injury lawsuit. Many of Tennessee’s standards for safe driving are codified in Chapter Eight of Title Fifty-Five of the Tennessee Code. This chapter is conveniently titled “Rules of the Road” and contains, you guessed it, Tennessee’s rules of the road.

T.C.A. Section 55-8-109 contains one of Tennessee’s most well-known rules of the road, which is that drivers are required to obey any official traffic-control devices that is properly placed in accordance with Tennessee law. The most obvious example of this is that drivers must obey stop lights when they come to them. A good example of what happens when drivers do not obey stop lights can be found here. When drivers fail to obey traffic lights, they pose a serious danger to themselves and other drivers around them. Should the driver’s negligent driving cause injury or damage to someone or something, there is a great chance that the driver will be held responsible since he or she violated one of the rules of the road and thereby fell below safe driving standards. Persons who have been injured as the result of another driver failing to obey a traffic signal should contact an experienced personal injury attorney in Tennessee that can help them recover for their injuries.

One possible defense these drivers may have is that the traffic-control device was not properly positioned and sufficiently legible to be seen by an ordinarily observant person. This basically means that the city or county cannot hide a stop sign behind a giant shrub and then give you a ticket for failing to stop at the stop sign. The test for this will be whether or not an ordinary driver would have noticed and obeyed the sign.

Drivers can often look to the Tennessee Code to see what constitutes negligence, because the rules of the road often embody safe driving standards. One can be reasonably sure that if a certain driving behavior is prohibited in the Tennessee Code, it is probably an unsafe driving behavior and will likely be a sufficient basis for recovery in a personal injury suit should the prohibited behavior cause an accident.

A good example of this can be found by looking at T.C.A. §55-8-124, which is Tennessee’s statute for Following Too Closely. The first part of a statute says that a driver may not follow another vehicle more closely than is reasonable and prudent. If this language seems familiar, it is because reasonable and prudent driving is the standard for non-negligent driving in Tennessee. Thus, if a driver looks to this section of the Code, he or she can see exactly how to avoid responsibility for causing injuries by following too closely.

The problem for drivers in interpreting this statute, however, is figuring out how much distance between a driver and a car in front of them is “reasonable and prudent.” This determination will depend on the circumstances surrounding the driver at the time. For example, if it is raining, a reasonable driver will leave more distance between his car and the car in front of him in order to have more room to come to a stop. Likewise, if a driver is driving in a high-speed area, she would reasonably decide to leave more space between her and the car in front of her to maximize the allowable room for ever. As a general rule, adverse weather conditions would require the driver to leave more room in front of them to have more of a safety net. Tennessee puts the burden on drivers to understand what is reasonable in any given situation and to drive accordingly, or else face being the defendant in a personal injury suit.

A bus rolled over on an Arizona freeway last week, killing six and injuring sixteen others. The bus was traveling from Mexico to Los Angeles when it struck a pickup truck on Interstate 10, causing the bus to flip. After conducting an investigation into the cause of the crash, authorities are now saying that the bus had multiple problems, including problems with its brakes and drivers. The brakes were reportedly so bad that the bus should have been taken off of the road, and one of the drivers of the bus may have been unable to read English well enough to navigate the roadways. Both of the drivers also failed to keep adequate logs of their previous seven days of activity.

As this situation demonstrates, there are often several different causes of an accident. Tennessee recognizes this principle and allows a jury to allocate fault among all of the parties to a suit, including the plaintiff or someone who is a non-party, in order to ensure that the each responsible party bears the adequate level of responsibility for its negligence.

Continue reading " Bus Crash Kills Six, Injures Sixteen Others " »

This blog has discussed many different methods of negligent driving, but today’s subject is one is a completely new one. A fifty-three year-old woman from England was pulled over this week by policemen who spotted that she was driving down the road while the hood of her car was unlatched and covering her windshield. The woman had reportedly been using the four inch gap between the hood and the dashboard to look out at the road while she was driving. As luck would have it, local law enforcement officers were conducting a safety campaign to educate people about bad driving when they pulled the woman over. The woman told police that she was trying to drive her car to the mechanic to be repaired, which was probably true, but it was to no avail.

Tennessee law determines that negligent driving occurs any time a person drives in a manner that a reasonably prudent driver would not. Thus, any time you are driving in a situation where you cannot see the road ahead of you, you are driving negligently because a reasonably safe driver would not drive in such a condition. It will probably be of little help to the driver in the situation above that she had a valid excuse, because that does little to change the fact that she was indeed driving her car even though it was in a condition that was unsafe for driving, posing a danger to herself and other drivers on the roadway. Had the lady caused an accident in Tennessee by driving in such a manner, she very likely would have been responsible for the damages and injuries sustained by those involved in the wreck, even in spite of the fact that she was attempting to take the car to get it fixed.

Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1258036/What-mean-I-road-officer-Woman-pulled-driving-VERY-faulty-bonnet.html

According to the Associated Press, the Transportation Department released a statement on Thursday saying that its projections showed that highway deaths in the United States totaled fewer than 34,000 in the year 2009, down nine percent from the previous year and the lowest total since the 1950’s. The reduction in deaths is at least partly attributable to increased seat belt use, less frequent drunken driving, and more stringent enforcement of traffic laws. According to the article, highway deaths have steadily declined since 2005.

This statistic may surprise some readers of this blog, which frequently focuses on traffic accidents in Tennessee and their causes by looking at developing technology and its tendency to create unsafe driving conditions. The reality is that these unsafe conditions have been mitigated by the factors listed above as well as ever-increasing vehicle quality that helps to protect passengers, but that it still only takes one accident to cause serious injury or death on the roadways.

Continue reading " Highway Death Totals Lowest Since the 1950's " »

There are many activities that have been discussed previously on this blog that do not mesh well with driving, such as texting, drinking alcohol, using illegal drugs, and sleeping. One such activity that has been little discussed but is equally as dangerous is grooming or primping while driving. On any given day in a heavy- or medium-traffic area, one is likely to see a multitude of derivatives of this behavior. It is not at all uncommon to see another driver putting on makeup, tweezing his or her eyebrows, styling his or her hair, generally checking his or her appearance etc. In some cases, one may even see another driver performing some routine bikini-line maintenance while her passenger steers the vehicle.

The issue with all of these forms of activity is that when a driver is focused on his or her hair, eyes, lips, eyebrows, or other assorted bodily locations, that driver is not completely focused on the road ahead, which, as luck would have it, is where all of the other vehicles and pedestrians who are using the roadway happen to be. This failure to keep a proper lookout is negligent in Tennessee and can result in an accident for which the negligent driver will be held responsible. Needless to say, the act of grooming or primping while driving is one that causes more than its fair share of accidents on the roadways, especially in high-traffic areas where people tend to perform a good chunk of their morning beautification ritual while in the vehicle on the way to work or school.

There is simply nothing a potential victim of such activity could do to try to avoid the accident, since there is no way to know the man behind you is trying to trim his goatee in the carpool lane until he rear-ends your vehicle. However, victims can recover for their damages by bringing a personal injury suit against the negligent driver, which would enable the victim(s) to recover for the damages and injuries caused by the negligent conduct.

Tennessee imposes many duties on drivers within the state in order to make sure that they are driving in a reasonably safe manner. One such duty is the duty to keep a proper lookout. This duty extends not only to keeping a proper lookout for vehicles and other obstacles in the roadway, but also extends to keeping a lookout for pedestrians as well. Unfortunately many drivers fail to drive in a safe manner in areas where they know or should expect pedestrians to be present. Such places include school zones, college campuses, heavily populated areas, and crosswalks. Failure to keep a proper lookout in these areas can lead to serious injury or even death and is also likely to lead to a personal injury lawsuit in East Tennessee should the driver’s negligent behavior result in injury to the victim.

A memorial service is reportedly being planned for a sixty-four year-old college student at the University of Central Oklahoma who was killed on Tuesday in an automobile-pedestrian accident. The woman apparently took the bus to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays and was stepping out into the street to board the bus on Tuesday morning near her apartment complex when she was struck by a vehicle. Law enforcement officials say it looked like she may have walked into the side of a moving vehicle, and the manager of the apartment complex said she may have gotten her suitcase used to carry her books stuck on something and was trying to get it unstuck as she stepped out into the road. There is no indication in the article of who was at fault for the accident.

The unfortunate truth is that sometimes there is simply nothing a driver can do to avoid accidents, even if he or she is keeping a proper lookout. For this reason, drivers should drive much more slowly and with a much greater degree of caution in areas where they know pedestrians are present just in case something out of the ordinary might happen. Failure to take extra care may result in the driver being liable for the damages should a scenario take place like the one described above.

Source: http://newsok.com/memorial-service-planned-for-uco-student-killed-in-auto-pedestrian-accident/article/3443570

Authorities are now releasing details of a bus crash in Florida that was responsible for the deaths of two people on board the bus. They say an eighty-one year old woman who was driving her car failed to yield and struck the bus on its side. The bus was carrying senior citizens who were on a cultural tour, and there were reportedly thirty-two people on board at the time of the crash. The collision caused the bus to run off the road, roll over twice, and eject some of its passengers. It took the efforts of several emergency response crews to attempt to treat everyone who was at the scene. The driver was not as unfortunate as most of the bus passengers, as she sustained only minor injuries as a result of the crash.

This situation demonstrates how dangerous failure to yield can be on the roadways. Wherever a driver sees a “yield” sign on the road, he or she must wait until no oncoming traffic would be affected by that driver entering traffic before making the decision to enter the roadway. While it is common to see drivers treat a “yield” sign in a similar manner to a stop sign, that is not a correct interpretation of the rule of the road requiring drivers to yield. Yielding has nothing to do with stopping or even slowing down your vehicle, but rather implies that a driver defer to all oncoming traffic before deciding to entering the road.

As seen above, the failure to yield can cause serious accidents and may very well result in a significant amount of liability being placed on the offending driver, who will likely be responsible for any damages and injuries (including, in this case, wrongful death or some similar claim) sustained by any victims should the decision not to yield cause an auto accident. Drivers should always be wary of yield signs and make sure the way is clear before they decide to enter the roadway.

Source: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/other/1110/02-23-2010/20100223052007_13.html