Misdeclared Container Weights as a Factor in Deadly TX Cargo Accidents

Galveston maritime injury attorneys note that ships’ masters and cargo loaders have learned the hard way about the tendency of shippers to misdeclare the weights of their shipping containers on shipping manifests. Shippers hope to avoid the extra costs associated with higher weights of shipped goods. And they know that the lack of regulations mandating weighing of containers prior to loading and the lack of funds and manpower for inspecting cargo allows them to get away with their subterfuges. It’s only when accidents result from the misdeclared container weights that the differences might be noticed.

Ships’ masters use declared weights of shipping containers to plan their stowage requirements and loading for onboard stability at sea. If shipping containers weigh more than the declared amounts, higher containers in a stack can magnify any structural integrity problems or weaknesses in containers lower in the stack. Our Galveston maritime injury attorneys caution shippers that this extra weight stress can lead to sudden collapses of entire container stacks and costly injuries or fatalities.

An individual shipping container might weigh many tons and measure 40 feet long. A cargo collapse accident isn’t like a stack of boxes collapsing out of an overloaded closet at home. A collapse of a shipping container stack can easily be deadly. Excess, misdeclared container weights not only overstress the shipping containers, they also apply excessive compression and racking forces on the lashings that secure the shipping containers in place on board a cargo vessel. Heavy weather during transit only adds to the danger.

But sometimes the cargo accident occurs before the container even reaches the ship. For instance, a few months ago our Galveston maritime injury attorneys read about a cargo accident on an Australian wharf from misdeclared container weight. A 28-ton shipping container that had been declared as only 4 tons fell more than 40 feet from a crane and narrowly missed crushing two workers who wisely ran for their lives when they saw the danger. The 28-ton container had exceeded the crane’s weight limit.

Cargo accidents resulting from excess, misdeclared container weights can easily lead to catastrophic injury and death. Expenses from such accidents can be life-long for surviving victims. Families of victims who don’t survive often find themselves without the family’s primary breadwinner. Victims might be eligible for financial compensation for their losses under the Jones Act, the LHWCA, or the Death on the High Seas Act.

If you’ve been injured or lost a loved one to a cargo accident and you need to know what steps you should take to obtain a financial recovery and get your life back on track, contact our Galveston maritime injury attorneys for a free and confidential legal consultation regarding the accident. You can call us toll free at 877-307-9500 or click on the live chat option on our website for help. We could answer your urgent questions about what to do and how to proceed in making your recovery. The consultation is free; the legal advice could be priceless.

Negligence in Worker’s Death by Moving Crane at Barbours Cut Terminal

A man working at the Barbour’s Cut Terminal on the Houston Ship Channel just suffered a horrific, fatal accident when he got trapped beneath a crane that suddenly started moving. The heavy machine’s sudden motion apparently caught the worker up by surprise and severed his legs.

According to the news account of the Terminal worker’s death at the Houston ship channel, the vice president of the International Longshoreman’s Association said that “the crane is designed to move” and that the tragedy “appears to be an accident.” The news account of the tragedy is too brief to provide a full context to the tragedy.

Indeed, it’s not long enough for the Association vice president’s statement to make much sense. Most heavy equipment is “designed to move” in some way. But is it designed to move suddenly, without warning to fragile human workers who might be in its vicinity and who might suffer grievous injuries from even slight contact with the moving crane?

A crane is an enormously heavy and powerful device. It has to be to do its job. It would just make sense that such a machine, before lurching into sudden motion, would warn nearby people to stand clear. Or least warn them it was about to move in some way, then give them a chance to get out of the way. Or that the operator of the crane would take care not to catch up other innocent workers in his machine’s motion.

Was there a warning that should have been issued that wasn’t issued before this mammoth machine began its motion? Did the warning signal not work? Were there not any safety procedures in place providing that such a warning should be issued? Did the machine suddenly go into motion when it shouldn’t have due to a defect, operator error, or an easily accessible control switch left unguarded? Was the operator of the crane not paying attention when he initiated the crane’s motion?

Basically, what happened in this tragic fatality? The news report doesn’t really say. But it does appear that the worker trapped and killed by the crane’s motion was taken by surprise. And the news report implies that the worker was a regular worker or longshoreman. Such a worker would probably be familiar with working in the vicinity of the cranes along the Houston ship channel’s busy piers and terminals.

Even with so little hard information available, it seems that some degree of negligence on the part of an owner, crane operator, or other party must be involved for this accident to have affected the tragically killed worker in the way that it did. The worker’s devastated surviving family members could be eligible to obtain just compensation for the needless loss of their loved one.

Injured workers also have recourse through a Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920) tort case or through a worker’s compensation claim under the Longshore and Harbor Workers’ Compensation Act. We discuss the ways they could find some recompense through these Acts in further articles.

For help determining whether a Jones Act tort action of an LHWCA compensation claim governs your accident, click here.

How Much do U.S. Medical Device Companies Care About Your Health?

Pearland Medical Device Lawyers Pose the Question: Do U.S. Medical Device Companies Care More About Your Health than They Care About Profits?

Our Pearland medical device lawyers simply leave it as a rhetorical question. We figure that you probably know the answer.

As a case in point, the U.S. Department of Justice has jumped into a lawsuit against Boston Scientific, now owner of Guidant. Guidant is the U.S. medical device company that made the flawed implantable defibrillator device at issue in the case.

The U.S. DOJ’s case stems from a private lawsuit filed by a New York patient who received an implantable defibrillator in 2002. According to the lawsuit, the defective medical device malfunctioned after it was implanted. Our Pearland medical device lawyers suspect that the defibrillator device malfunction caused serious pain, trauma, and medical expense to the hapless victim.

A federal regulation rewards those who report Medicare fraud by U.S. medical device companies and other parties. The U.S. DOJ lawsuit alleges that Guidant supplied a defibrillator device it knew to be flawed and fraudulently charged Medicare for that device.

With admirable sang froid, the Boston Scientific corporate attorney says that the company will respond to the U.S. DOJ’s intervention as “appropriate.” Our Pearland medical device lawyers think that our ideas of what’s appropriate might just differ from theirs. After all, the U.S. DOJ involvement comes AFTER Guidant pleaded guilty to multiple counts of related criminal charges.

A federal judge order the U.S. medical device company to pay almost $300 million in criminal penalties, and sentenced the company to three years of probation. The Guidant smack down depressed company prospects and left it open for takeover by Boston Scientific, which has inherited Guidant’s considerable liabilities.

To clarify, Guidant discovered problems with various defibrillation medical devices in 2002, 2003, and 2004. But it continued to market, sell, and charge Medicare for these defibrillator device products known to cause dangerous injury and death. It also filed a false report with the FDA.

I don’t think we Pearland medical device lawyers need to reiterate the question of whether this U.S. medical device company cared more for your health or for its profits. The answer resides in its guilty pleas to federal criminal charges. Guidant finally recalled the flawed, defective medical devices responsible for at least 13 known deaths in 2005. Clearly Guidant could have used some sensible guidance along the route to ruin.

Automated Cardiac Defibrillators in Hospitals: No Simple Answers: Pt 1

Our product defect attorneys want to inform you of a critical healthcare debate you might not know about yet. It involves the upgrade from a known, tested, and reliable medical device to one not yet tested in the hospital setting when it was widely adopted.

A little more than 10 years ago, a committee of the American Heart Association recommended that hospitals upgrade their cardiac care technology to include expensive dual-mode defibrillators. A trained doctor, nurse, or medical technician could use the dual-mode defibrillators in the traditional manual mode. These new defibrillators could also turn on automatically and by used by staff with lower skill sets to respond to cardiac arrest conditions. The old manual models cost a little over $1,500. The new dual-mode medical device models cost around $10,000.

Product defect attorneys recognize that without a doubt, the upgrade made sense in theory. But we also know that unseen product defects and potential liabilities often lie hidden within new technologies and products of all sorts. Concerned hospital administrators, doctors and nurses knew that it could take time for properly trained medical personnel to receive notification of and respond to the bedside of a patient suffering a cardiac arrest. Response times might be longer in the wee hours of the night shift.

Having an automated defibrillator that responded to the crisis automatically and that could be used by hospital staff with lower levels of training must have seemed a godsend. And the new device received strong endorsement from a committee of the American Heart Association itself. The committee’s recommendation even took a scolding tone towards those hospitals that hadn’t yet seen the light and jumped on the dual-mode bandwagon. What more did a concerned hospital need before allocating the budgetary funds to the device?

What these concerned and compliant hospitals probably did not know was that more than 25% of key committee members were beholding to the manufacturers of the dual-mode devices. They might well have had some “conflicts of interest” (as we in the legal field call it) when they made their committee recommendation.

And the dual-mode devices had not yet been evaluated in the hospital setting to see whether they actually improved survival rates. Many theories that sound quite good get shot down in the empirical evidence gathering process. The scientific method is all about putting theories to the test before implementing them.

Continue to Part 2.

Part 2 of Discussion on Safety of Automated Dual-Mode Defibrillators

Continued from Part 1.

As it turns out, empirical evidence suggests that the dual-mode devices may actually lead to a net loss of about 1,000 lives per years rather than to any net gain. The reasons for this are several as Fairwarning, a nonprofit engaged in publishing news on safety and health issues, points out.

• Nurses with lower levels of training feel intimidated by the dual-mode defibrillators and avoid operating them.

Bad batteries in the devices can destroy their utility.
For reasons unclear, the dual-mode devices sometimes fail to turn on when they should, and sometimes turn off when they shouldn’t.
Electric shocks often won’t restart the stopped heart of patients suffering from grave illness or extensive injury; manual CPR is required.
Somehow I don’t find any of these reasons very surprising. Anyone who’s used technology knows that battery-operated devices can be cranky and unreliable when you most need them. Even devices with rechargeable batteries will eventually fail as the chemical reactions involved in charging, sustaining, and using the battery finally use up the necessary elements to initiate a power-up state. And even when batteries aren’t at fault, all sorts of factors can cause sudden and inexplicable problems with complex technological devices.

And I fully understand the reluctance of someone untrained on defibrillators to use even a mostly automated device. When someone’s life hangs in the balance, and you aren’t sure what you are doing or what the machine might be doing, you don’t want to be responsible for taking the crucial step that might lead to certain death.

Studies that have compared survival rates show that the use of manual defibrillators saved more lives in the hospital setting than the use of automated dual-mode defibrillators. Questions are being asked.

Predictably, those on the American Heart Association committee that made the recommendation in favor of using the dual-mode devices are either not responding to queries, or responding in vague, politically savvy language that says nothing clearly. 10,000 deaths or more might have resulted from their enthusiastic recommendation that was uninformed by any real evidence or hospital trials.

You may know someone who dies from cardiac arrest while at the hospital. If you lost a close family member, perhaps you already know what type of defibrillator the hospital employed in the incident. If you don’t know, you should probably have a product defect attorney experienced in medical device cases find out for you.

The inquiry process might meet some resistance. Your attorney might have to file court motions to compel an answer. If you need help in your effort, feel free to call on our product defect attorneys at Denena & Points. We have more than 12 years of experience helping those harmed by defective medical devices to successfully get the answers and the justice they need.

DWI Accident Victim’s Experience Tells of Danger from TX Drunk Drivers

Vincent Leone Jr. is one of the many victims of Texas drunk driving accidents. You may call him lucky. He survived.

But not without permanent disabilities, lifelong impairments, weeks in a coma, and severe brain damage from his injuries. Yet, compared to so many other victims of Texas drunk driving accidents that he has met, Mr. Leone does count himself lucky. Our Cleveland, TX injury lawyers believe that Mr. Leone’s own strength of will and determination to overcome his injuries helped him make his luck.

In a coma for 6.5 weeks from which even doctors did not know if he would emerge a vegetable, Mr. Leone initially could not speak. He had partial paralysis of the left side of his body. And he still can’t maintain enough bodily equilibrium to walk without falling.

But Mr. Leone still counts himself lucky. With will, effort, and intensive therapy, he recovered his capacity for speech and enough mobility and functionality to live somewhat independently. And he can tell others his story and provide a living example to others of the dangers of drunk driving.

Mr. Leone was just 26 years old and the proud owner of a new Corvette Stingray when a drunk driver destroyed his car and his world in 1982 in Cleveland, TX. Mr. Leone had just driven his new car off the lot when the devastating wreck occurred.

The high-speed impact from the drunk driver drove Mr. Leone’s car into a telephone pole. The pole came down through the top of his car and onto the top of his head. The closed head injury he received from the heavy pole led to his further incapacities and injuries.

The drunk driver fled the scene of the wreck and police were unable to locate him. Mr. Leone’s father hired a private investigator that found the drunk driver’s residence, littered with empty liquor bottles, but no drunk driver.

The drunk driver who hit Vincent Leone Jr. had just been released from jail on a drunk driving charge. Apparently that drunk driver spent a day in the “drunk tank,” then liquored himself up again upon release, only to crash into Mr. Leone and his new Stingray. According to the CDC, the average drunk driver drives drunk 80 times before his or her first DWI arrest. Mr. Leone comments that the penalties for repeated drunk driving offenses are “so lax.”

Our Cleveland, TX injury lawyers agree. Even though Texas has recently strengthened the penalties somewhat for drunk driving offenses, the penalties still bear no real relationship to the true severity of the crimes. Drunk drivers who kill their victims might get a few years in jail. They might get off the hook entirely. But the victim’s penalty is the loss of his or her life; and the victim has committed no offense before being thus penalized.

Beware the Word “Reform” in any Legislation in Texas or Elsewhere

You can be almost certain that the “reform” that the law has in store for you will re-form your life, your health, your options, and/or your finances for the worse. Don’t believe me? I admire your idealism and undaunted optimism. But let’s look at the track record. We’ve seen massive legislation on:

• Immigration reform,
• Housing reform,
• Finance reform,
• Healthcare reform, and
• Tort reform, among other things.

Who benefited from these so-called reforms? You, or various special interests? If you said the special interests, consider: special interests contribute far more to the coffers of the politicians that pass these reforms than do the ordinary Americans who often get shafted by legislative reforms.

The legislation passes and receives the “reform” label because most Americans would like real reforms in many of these areas. But that’s never what we seem to receive. If we ever see major tax “reform” legislation, that’s probably when we can all kiss any remaining income goodbye. (I’m just going by the “reform” track record here. I could be wrong. I hope I’m wrong in fact.)

My point is that the so-called medical malpractice “tort reform” that purported to offer Texans so many benefits has actually done the reverse. The medical and insurance industries have reaped the benefits of this legislation. The unfortunate victims of medical malpractice, or their surviving family members, have been left largely without recourse.

Many reputable personal injury lawyers won’t even take medical malpractice cases anymore, because they know there’s really nothing that pursuing the case can offer to the victim. Only where a medical injury relates to a defective medical device does a victim generally have hope of a fair financial recovery based on the injuries caused by medical negligence.

Sadly, Texas tort reform has offered us another “heads they win; tails you lose” scenario. So just look out whenever you see that word “reform” ominously tacked onto another piece of legislation. You can be pretty sure that new law offers you nothing but grief and higher costs.

Street Racing in Houston, TX: Illegal, Stupid. Deadly. Dangerous.

So you think you’re a racer? James Dean thought he was a racer. He’s dead. Dale Earnhardt, Sr. actually was a racer – one of the best. The Intimidator. He’s dead too. As they say: speed is the thrill that kills. In fact the pantheon of racers, both professional racers and wannabe “street racer” pretenders, is filled with the names of people who died ugly, untimely deaths. That main hall of that pantheon is filled with the names of illegal street racers’ innocent victims. Street racing isn’t real racing. It isn’t drag racing. It’s illegal. And it’s just plain stupid, deadly, and dangerous.
Venues for illegal street racing in Houston, TX have become a mecca for the wannabe pretenders. The wannabes bring their modified cars all the way to our city from distant states just to engage in illegal street racing. The fact is that if a person wants to engage in a deadly stupid activity that’s likely to kill him, he can probably do that at home. Statistics conclusively show that you don’t need to go far from home to get yourself killed.
Statistics on street racing fatalities are sparse. It’s an underreported crime and police often attribute the wreck to more traditional factors. What statistics do exist present a sobering picture. A government study of fatal wrecks that found 315 of the wrecks attributed to illegal street racing also found a total of 399 fatalities attributable to those accidents. Learn about the human toll of fatal street racing accidents.
People from out of town tend to say that Houston traffic is dangerous and that people drive crazy here. In defense of the safe drivers among my fellow Houstonians, I have to mention that some of that dangerous craziness comes by way of the out of town street racers. And the Houston, TX police have been repeatedly taken to task for their lax enforcement of street racing laws. Some people think that their lax enforcement and hands off approach to the crime is the reason that Houston, TX has become a magnet for street racers all across the nation.
The epidemic in Houston, TX street racing and the consequent steep rise in fatalities has led Houston, TX police to indicate they might step up enforcement of the laws. If you do get caught for street racing the penalties can be stiff. They can include jail time, large fines, impoundment of your car, and loss of your driver’s license, among other things. But the stiffest penalty you’ll face for illegal street racing is the loss of your life.

Things to Know When Insurance Drama Follows Your Accident Trauma

As Pearland, TX personal injury accident attorneys, we get questions all the time from people wanting to know if they’re getting a fair settlement offer from the insurance company. This is an important question because in most cases, any financial compensation you finally receive for your accident injuries will come from an insurance company. You probably know that insurance is an industry like any other. The insurance companies are in the business of making money. They’re not actually in the business of giving away money, though it may appear that way.
So when an insurance company receives your accident claim, the company makes it their business to examine that claim in detail to determine its validity and its worth. The insurance will look for evidence of your own comparative negligence. If the insurance company finds that your own actions contributed sufficiently to causing the accident, they may be able to dismiss your accident claim entirely. In other cases, they may only be able to reduce the value of your accident claim. The bottom line remains that getting a fair settlement offer from the insurance company goes against insurers’ best interests. This problem, of course, works against your best interests in the claim.
After the fact, going back to find out exactly who all holds responsibility for causing the accident, and how they caused it, presents some difficulty. So the insurance company may well try to enlist your aid in finding a basis to dismiss your accident claim. They’ll ask you all sorts of questions about the accident, over and over, attempting to elicit statements that they can use against you to reveal your own role in causing the accident. You may think they’re only trying to be helpful or thorough in asking all these questions and that you’ll be getting a fair settlement offer from the insurance company. Wrong. By answering their questions, unfortunately you may be destroying your own case.
You would do well to hire an experienced Pearland, TX personal injury accident attorney right away, and leave all dealings with the insurance company to your attorney. Your attorney could handle contacts with the insurers for you. Your attorney could spare you the danger of unwittingly making statements that the insurance company can and will use against you to make you look responsible for causing the accident.
The insurance companies are in the business of examining, discrediting and denying your accident claims. Insurance company profits rely on an ability to ensure that settlement offers and payouts cost less than the value of the policy premiums coming in. So you need someone who’s in the business of successfully prosecuting and winning accident claims to ensure that you obtain the compensation you deserve. To successfully win against the practiced insurance companies, you need an able personal injury accident attorney on your side.
If you’ve been injured in an accident in the Pearland, TX area, kindly give us a call for your free legal consultation. We could answer questions you may have about your accident claim and any trouble you’re having getting a fair settlement offer from the insurance company. Let us help you obtain the fair financial compensation that you need to pay your accident expenses and move on with life again after the accident trauma and insurance drama.

Prolapse – Yet Another Medical Problem Complicated by Excess Weight

Are you as tired of constantly hearing the admonitions to lose weight as I am? These calls to watch our weight often come from the same medical and governmental authorities that maintain a rather total silence regarding the presence of refined sugar in just about every one of our foods and drinks. (Do we really need sugar, or “high fructose corn syrup,” in our potato chips? In our meats? In our spaghetti sauce? Can we please just save the sugars for dessert? I’m just asking.)

To me, this constant call to lose weight smacks of hypocrisy. It places the onus upon us to correct problems caused elsewhere, usually at a business profit. I bring up this issue because in virtually every piece of medical literature I’ve read regarding prolapsed pelvic organs, the writers advise that excess weight will hasten the onset of prolapse, and add to its severity.

This is basically because prolapse occurs when the interior connective tissues that hold the pelvic organs in place begin to stretch. When this stretching occurs, the pelvic organs begin to fall. When they fall, the prolapsed pelvic organs bulge into the vagina. In severe prolapse cases, they will exit the vagina to hang outside the body. Childbirth is one cause of the stretching of these interior support tissues. Excess weight also places a lot of stress on the tissues and causes them to stretch. Childbirth in conjunction with excess weight hastens the onset of prolapsed pelvic organs.

Your tendencies to gain and lose weight are largely genetic. But very few people have the genes that can maintain a slim weight, even with substantial exercise, in a society where almost every single food and drink is packed with refined sugars and their analogs. We can go out to the store and buy designer jeans. But designer genes still remain mostly beyond our grasp. So I call on those same authorities that keep telling us to lose weight. I call on them to direct their efforts instead to telling food and drink manufacturers to stop adding so many refined sugars and calories to our daily diet!