Unmanned Construction Equipment Crashes into Home
One often-overlooked aspect of vehicular negligence is the importance of always supervising your vehicle when it is running and, to a lesser extent, controlling who has access to it when it is not running. Failure to take either of these precautions can result in a substantial amount of personal injury liability being imputed to the party who was responsible for supervising the vehicle. For a good example of the types of damages that can be caused by a runaway vehicle, we can look to a situation that occurred last Friday in Connecticut in which an unmanned excavator was somehow put into gear and immediately took off to terrorize the surrounding area. The excavator was reportedly started in order to be warmed up and left unmanned by the construction crew. While the excavator was warming up, its movable windshield fell in and hit the controls, putting it into gear. The excavator reportedly leveled a shed, plowed over some trees, and flattened a camper before smashing into the garage of a nearby house, damaging the home’s foundation and cracking the walls. Thankfully, no one was injured.
Stories where vehicles cause damage due to being unmanned are fairly common on the personal injury front. More often than not, it is a vehicle such as a car or truck that is left unmanned and knocked into gear or taken for a spin by an ambitious child that makes the headlines. Whatever the type of vehicle, situations such as these can be deadly as vehicles wander aimlessly or are driven recklessly, crashing into houses and drifting into traffic. These situations present the risks of large monetary damages and serious bodily injury to victims. Tennessee imposes a duty on its drivers to take reasonable care that this does not happen to their vehicles. Failure to take such care is actionable negligence.
Situations like this cannot always be prevented even by the use of reasonable care, but many of them can. Tennesseans who have been injured as the result of a situation like this or a similar occurrence should consult with an experienced personal injury attorney who can assist that person in recovering for his or her injuries and damages.
Source: http://news.findlaw.com/ap/other/features/1120/04-16-2010/20100416053510_02.html
