Abels & Annes, P.C. Personal Injury Blog

Un hombre está siendo tratado en un hospital del área de Phoenix con lesiones potencialmente mortales después de estar involucrado en un accidente pedestre. Él fue atropellado por un carro el lunes por la tarde al cruzar una calle en el lado norte de la ciudad. El incidente se produjo justo al oeste de la intersección de la Avenida 19 y Union Hills Drive. El Departamento de Bomberos de Phoenix respondieron al accidente y al llegar encontraron a un hombre tirado en el camino. Un portavoz de la policía declaró que el pedestre fue atropellado por un vehículo, pero no hay más información disponible. Han habido varios accidentes que involucran a pedestres últimamente en el área de Phoenix. Una colisión desafortunadamente involucro una niña de tres años de edad. La niña fue atropellada por un vehículo mientras caminaba con su madre. El incidente ocurrió alrededor de las 5:oo pm el 28 de diciembre en la Avenida Central y la calle McDowell. La niña fue trasladada en ambulancia a un hospital del área. En otro accidente, un pedestre de 55 años de edad murió crusando Yuma Road en Buckeye. La colisión ocurrió el 21 de diciembre y la víctima fue trasladada en helicóptero para recibir atención médica. Sin embargo, la mujer sucumbió a sus heridas en el hospital dos días después. Segun la estadísticas federales, Phoenix tiene el cuarto porcentaje más alto de muertes pedestres fuera de todas las ciudades mayores en los Estados Unidos. Nueva York tiene el mayor porcentaje. En Arizona, hubieron más de 1,500 accidentes de pedestres en 2011. Desafortunadamente, la mayoría de estos accidentes resultaron con heridas. Estas colisiones llevaron a 154 muertes pedestres y 1253 heridas. Mientras alguien camina puede ser golpeado por un carro en cualquier situación, la mayoría de los choques pedestres ocurren en […]

A man is currently being treated in a Phoenix area hospital with life-threatening injuries after being involved in a pedestrian accident. He was hit by a car on Monday evening while crossing a street on the North side of the city. The incident occurred just west of the intersection of 19th Ave. and Union Hills Drive. The Phoenix Fire Department responded to the accident and upon arrival they found a man lying in the road. A police spokesman stated the pedestrian was struck by a vehicle, but no other information was available. There have been several accidents involving pedestrians lately in the Phoenix area. One collision unfortunately involved a three-year-old. The child was struck by a vehicle while walking with her mother. The incident occurred around 5 PM on December 28 at Central Avenue and McDowell Road. The toddler was transported by ambulance to an area hospital. In another accident, a 55-year-old pedestrian was killed crossing Yuma Road in Buckeye. The collision occurred on December 21 and the victim was transported by helicopter for medical care. However, the woman succumbed to her injuries in the hospital two days later. According to federal statistics, Phoenix has the fourth highest percentage of pedestrian deaths out of all major cities in the United States. NYC has the highest percentage. In Arizona, there were just over 1,500 pedestrian accidents in 2011. Unfortunately, most of these crashes resulted in injuries. These collisions led to 154 pedestrian fatalities and 1253 injuries. While someone walking can be struck by a car in any setting, most pedestrian collisions occur in urban areas such as Phoenix where there is heavy pedestrian traffic. People on foot often find themselves sharing busy intersections with commuters, buses, taxi cabs and out-of-towners driving rental cars. If you have been hurt after being struck […]

It’s a scary thought – letting your teen out on our roadways without a supervising driver. Luckily, there are monitoring tools that can help parents to keep an eye on their newly-licensed drivers, even when they’re not able to ride with them. My Northwest recently reported about the Tiwi device, which is a device that can be installed in the windshield of your teen’s car. It knows where the car is, how fast it’s traveling and even the speed limit of the road it’s traveling on. This information is then passed on to the parents of these teen drivers, allowing them to keep an eye on their young driver’s habits behind the wheel and to help to reduce the risks of car accidents in Phoenix and elsewhere.The device also comes with a cellular modem and a GPS. This device is able to warn drivers about dangerous driving habits. If teens don’t listen to these warnings and they don’t shape up, then parents will be notified immediately. Our Phoenix car accident lawyers understand that teen drivers face some of the highest risks for car accidents on our roadways. These drivers are not equipped with the same driving experience as you and me. When our teen’s graduate from the GDL program, it’s important to stay on top of their driving habits to help ensure a safe driving career. Luckily, these devices and cell phone apps can help to keep an eye on these drivers even when parents can’t be present in the car. Like the Chicago Sun-Times reported, there are a number of smartphone apps that parents can use to keep an eye on their teen’s driving behavior. –iGuardianTeen: This app can monitor G-force readings in your kid’s vehicle, meaning if they’re taking turns too fast then parents will be notified. The […]

Every day, there are about four families across the U.S. that have the unfortunate task of burying a loved one who is killed as a result of a backover car accidents. What’s even worse is that many times these loved ones are children who have been backed over by a motor vehicle and killed, according to AZ Central. Many times, these accidents happen when a child or an elderly loved one gets caught in a vehicle’s blind spots. These accidents are a top concern for officials, but it seems that the solution may be a little farther away than we initially thought.Safe-driving advocates have been saying for years that these types of car accidents in Phoenix and elsewhere could be prevented if more vehicles were equipped with rear-view cameras. We could have seen more cars with this technology a lot sooner if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) had kept to its initial proposals to have camera technology in all new-model vehicles by 2014. While officials were supposed to finalize this rule in late February, it has now been postponed until later this year. Pressure from the automobile industry is being blamed for the delay. Our Arizona car accident attorneys understand that nearly 115 lives could be saved if all new-model cars had these rear-view cameras. In addition to that, officials believe the technology has the ability to prevent more than 7,500 injuries. Officials with the NHTSA have been working to require backover cameras in new cars to help to reduce these risks. “While the Department has made progress toward a final rule to improve rearward visibility, it has decided that further study and data analysis — including of a wider range of vehicles and drivers — is important to ensure the most protective and efficient rule possible,” said […]

Hey dummy! No. Not you. We’re talking about the new child dummy that’s going to help keep your kid safe in the event of a car accident in Phoenix. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there’s a brand new kid dummy that was recently unveiled. This little dummy is going to help test our car seats and booster seats that were created for child who weight more than 65 pounds and less than 80 pounds. The new “10-year-old kid” dummy is the latest addition to the family of NHTSA test dummies. It’s now considered to be the best tool out there that can measure the risks of injury for children who use higher-weight car seats in the event of an accidentAs car seat manufacturer’s work to create more specific car seats to meet the needs of consumers and their children, it is getting tougher and tougher to test each seat thoroughly because there are so many kinds available. The new dummy is helping researchers to tackle these new child car seats with the new weight requirements. Our Phoenix child injury attorneys understand that car accidents are the leading cause of death for those aged 3- to 14-years-old. According to the NHTSA, there were nearly 1,500 children of this young age group who were killed in car accidents across the nation in 2009. In addition to these fatalities, there were another 200,000 young passengers who were injured in these types of incidents. This means that about 4 kids were killed and another 490 were injured in these crashes every single day. A large number of these injuries and deaths could have been prevented if these children were properly buckled into an appropriate car seat. Parents, it’s up to you to make sure these little ones are securely fastened […]

Nearly 70 percent of teens in Arizona say that they drink alcohol with underage friends and while attending parties with these underage friends, according to a study conducted by the Arizona Underage Drinking Prevention Committee (UAD Committee). What most parents may fail to recognize is that their teen can get their hands on alcohol and many of these teens will drink it and get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle. Phoenix personal injury attorneys recommend that parents talk with their teen. Talk to them about the dangers of drinking and driving before we hit Spring Break.As a matter of fact, almost 35 percent of teen drivers who were killed in a car accident in Phoenix and elsewhere in 2009 were under the influence of alcohol, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). With assistance from parents and guardians, we can educate our young drivers to help to reduce their risks for these kinds of accidents. We ask for help from parents because according to the study from the UAD Committee, about half of the 1,000 Arizona parents who were surveyed said that they thought it was okay to serve underage youth alcohol as long as they were under the supervision of a parent or guardian. Another 40 percent admitted to knowing another adult who had provided alcohol to a person who was under the age of 21. Regardless of who is to blame for their access to alcohol, it’s important to talk with your teen about the risks and dangers associated with drinking and also with drinking and driving. This is especially important as we head into Spring Break. According to The Wall Street Journal, hospitalizations regarding underage drinkers totaled more than $750 million in 2008. The Mayo Clinic reports that there were nearly 40,000 admissions for […]

As a Phoenix car accident attorney who deals with the fallout of collisions on an ongoing basis, it’s hard not to notice that driving a car can be more like playing a video game nowadays. From the driver’s seat, we can search thousands of radio stations, request driving directions, surf the web, make phone calls, send text messages, update our Facebook status and adjust many other features of our vehicle. While many of these devices are designed to be voice-operated and hands-free, not everyone’s buying it. The main arguments against these devices are that we’re compromising roadway safety with all of these unnecessary distractions.Recently, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) submitted a set of recommendations to car makers, asking them to tone down the technology to help keep drivers’ attention on the road and to reduce the risks of car accidents in Phoenix and elsewhere. The NHTSA isn’t asking that these devices be completely eliminated from all cars. The agency is simply asking that these devices be disabled when a car is in drive, according to the Arizona Daily Star. There are a lot of in-car technologies designed to help make driving a little easier and our roadways a little safer. These are things like the advance warning systems that alert you before you encounter a potential accident. These types of safety devices are exempt in the NHTSA’s proposal. Gloria Bergquist with the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers says that automakers already have their own guidelines that they’ve been operating under since 2002. She says that drivers are going to talk on the phone and chat with passengers and look for directions and listen to music while they’re driving – no matter what. She says we might as well offer them a safer way to do it. “The guidelines we’re […]

There were more teen drivers who were killed in Arizona car accidents in the first half of 2011 in comparison to the same time frame in 2010. Arizona was one of the 23 states that saw an increase in teen driver deaths during this time, according to a recently released report from the Governor Highway Safety Association (GHSA).The recent report from the GHSA looked at the number of 16- to 17-year-old drivers who died in car accidents during the first six months of 2011 and compared those stats to the figures from the same time in 2010. During the study, there was an increase of 7 percent in the number of 17-year-old drivers who were killed and a 16 percent increase in the number of 16-year-old drivers who were killed. These statistics formed an overall increase of 11 percent. The report was headed by Dr. Allan Williams, the former chief scientist for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Our Arizona teen car accident attorneys understand that news of the increase in teen driver deaths was released as the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) released a report stating that the number if overall roadway fatalities had decreased by nearly one percent during the same time. In the GHSA’s report, there were 23 states that reported increases, 19 that reported decreases and 8 that stayed the exact same. North Carolina, Texas and Florida were a few of the states that reported the most significant increases during this time. Williams says that the significant increases in teen driver deaths across the country can be attributed to the specific laws of each state’s Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) program and the fact that they’re quickly losing steam. A lot of these laws have been in place for quite some time now and aren’t […]

Some manufacturers of hybrid vehicles boast of their near-silence on the road. While that might be great for motorists, it could lead to pedestrian accidents in Phoenix and across the country, according to a new study released by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Blind pedestrians were found to be at particular risk, as they relied more heavily on audio cues to warn them when a vehicle was near. But the truth of the matter is we are all at high risk of being injured by a driver who fails to yield or is otherwise careless — and this is particularly true when the vehicle is quiet or when city traffic or other environmental factors impair hearing. According to the study, hybrid-electric vehicles were more than two times as likely as regular vehicles to be involved in a pedestrian crash in which the vehicle is slowing or stopping, backing out, starting in traffic or pulling into or leaving a parking space or driveway. Phoenix pedestrian accident lawyers are aware that while speed is often considered a factor with serious crashes involving regular-engine cars, hybrid cars are more likely to cause injury to pedestrians when they are moving at low speeds. The designers of the study concluded that is because at lower speeds, these vehicles are even quieter. Groups representing the blind have voiced concerns about the decibel level of these vehicles. The reason these vehicles are quieter has to do with their fuel source – electric, rather than gas. In fact, they make virtually no noise at all when they are moving slowly. The chairwoman of the National Federation of the Blind’s Committee on Automotive and Pedestrian Safety, was quoted as saying she is used to being able to derive audio cues from her surroundings in order to safely get […]

In what is being labeled as a freak accident, a 30-year-old man lost his life at an indoor trampoline park after suffering spinal cord injuries in Phoenix. According to The Arizona Republic, the man broke his neck after falling into a foam pit inside one of the half-dozen trampoline parks that have emerged in the Phoenix area in recent years. The sites have been a magnet for recreation-seekers of all ages, but have also, according to the newspaper, been the site for a number of injuries – everything from strained muscles to fractured bones. While both the trampoline park is conducting its own investigation into what happened, the park remains open. Our Phoenix injury lawyers want everyone to keep in mind that government oversight of these type of facilities is minimal, as this is a somewhat new genre. Many of these parks have not only trampolines, but dodge ball, Velcro walls and basketball hoops. City and county officials don’t inspect for much more than fire hazards or the safety of the actual structure. Inspectors are not looking at whether the equipment is safe for play, according to the newspaper article. The centers have cropped up across the state, with two in Phoenix, one in Peoria, one in Scottsdale, one in Glendale and three in Chandler. In the last two years, some of these centers have had more than 30 calls for an emergency ambulance. Unlike gymnastics centers, these trampoline parks might not require their staff to acquire any sort of safety certification. Patrons are often required to sign a waiver, freeing the park of any liability if you get hurt. There is at least one case, though, in which The Republic is reporting the parents of a 17-year-old are suing, saying someone other than the teen’s legal guardian signed the […]