By Christopher Tuffley

www.newssun.com

SEBRING –Two fatalities have been confirmed by the Florida Highway Patrol in the charter bus crash that occurred at 2:15 p.m. Monday afternoon on U. S. 27 at the intersection with Lake Francis Road.

The bus, chartered by South Florida Community College for its Exploritas program, was traveling north, returning from a tour of the Lake Placid murals at the time of the crash.

FHP Lt. Chris Miller confirms that Alice J. Adams, 81, a resident of Lake Placid, was driving east on Lake Frances Road in a 2010 red Mercury when she attempted to enter the northbound lanes of U. S. 27.

At this time it is unclear why Adams failed to yield the right of way to the bus.

Larry L. Metzer, 69, the bus driver, attempted to avoid the Mercury, but the front right of the car struck the left side of the bus. That blow caused the bus to veer off onto the east shoulder of the highway where it overturned into a ditch.

This resulted in the ejection of several passengers and there were extensive injuries.

Thirty-two people, including the driver, were on the bus at the time of the crash. Only one person was not transported to a hospital.

Two were pronounced dead at the scene, three had critical injuries and the rest had serious to minor injuries. Aeromed and Bay Life were two of the several companies providing helicopter evacuation. At least five helicopters picked up victims.

Becky Rousch, who directs community education for SFCC, was on the bus.

Deborah Bell, spokesperson for SFCC, reports Rousch is resting comfortably and recovering.

Of the 11 victims transported to Florida Hospital in Lake Placid, two were later airlifted to larger hospitals and nine remained hospitalized as of Tuesday morning.

Tiffany Bender, spokes person for Florida Hospital, said Tuesday that Florida Hospital, Heartland Division had been expecting 12 victims at the Sebring emergency room, but half of those victims were airlifted directly from the scene and only six victims were transported to the Sebring campus. Of that number two remain hospitalized locally and four were later flown to Orlando.

Highlands Regional Medical Center received seven victims.

John Dunn, spokesperson for Tampa General Hospital, said Tuesday morning that six victims were airlifted to the hospital, three directly from the scene and three from Highlands County hospitals.

Hospitals in Orlando also took in the injured, and Lee Memorial Hospital in Ft. Myers took in one.

Early reports indicated the bus passengers were all from Boston, Mass.

Exploritas, an independent company which SFCC uses in its community education program, is based in Boston, but the tourists on the bus came from many different states, including Indiana and Virginia. Bell said the day of the crash was the first day of a week-long program.

The bus had been on its way to deliver the tourists to their hotel.

“Right now we are focusing on the individuals and their families,” Bell said. “We are working closely with local authorities and Exploritas.”

Posted February 20, 2010

By Ben Sosenko

NBCConnecticut.com

A school in Winsted will be shut down for the next three school days, after a classroom accident sent a 5th grade teacher to the Bridgeport Burn Unit.

Kristy Ejzak was injured on February 11, 2010 when she attempted to flip a light switch in her classroom at Pearson Middle School and Academy. A circuit breaker failed, causing her to burn her hand, and suffer shock related injures.

 ”Our main concern all along has been the health and safety of our staff and students,” said Blaise Salerno,Winchester School Superintendent.

 Since the incident, all light switches in the school have been replaced, and all electrical outlets are in the process of being replaced.

A local electrical contractor investigated the cause of the incident, and with their findings, Superintendent Blaise Salerno decided in the interest of safety to students and staff, the school will be closed on February 22, 23 and 24, while repairs made.

“We have decided that we would prefer to err on the side of caution,” explained Salerno. “It will take us a day or two to get the equipment, and a day or two to get it installed.”

Back in 2007, an architectural firm found numerous electrical problems at the school. Some of those issues, involved code violations, and outdated equipment. However, a $42 million bonding package to fix the problems was not approved.

“We just have not had the level of resources necessary to address the physical needs of our building,” said Salerno.

The failed circuit breaker in the accident was over 30 years old.

Parents of students at Pearson Middle School and Academy say they hope in the future money does not get in the way of their children’s safety.

“Now it’s concerning the safety,” said parent Dawn Cave. “It’s not just things getting cut. Now it’s the safety of teachers and students, so that’s a little hard.”

Posted February 20, 2010

By KYW’s Michelle Durham

An off -duty Philadelphia Police officer is under arrest in connection with the accident on I-95 that injured a Pennsylvania State Police trooper in the line of duty early Saturday morning. The accident happened around 4am on Northbound I-95 near the Girard Avenue exit:

Philadelphia Police Officer Matthew Sharkey has been charged with DUI and Aggravated Assault, according to Pennsylvania State Police Spokesperson Trooper Danea Durham:

“We got a call in reference to an abandoned vehicle in the travel lanes of I-95 northbound. Two troopers responded. PPA was called to load the vehicle onto the tow truck and while that was happening, unfortunately another driver came and hit the car.”

Durham says the trooper was pinned to the tow truck. He was rushed to Hahnemann Hospital with a leg fracture. The other trooper and the Philadelphia Parking Authority Tow Truck driver both received minor injuries.

The 23-year-old Sharkey has been on the Philadelphia police force three years and is assigned to the 17th district.

February 7, 2010

Middletown, Connecticut (CNN) — Five people were killed and at least 12 were injured in a gas explosion Sunday at an under-construction power plant in central Connecticut, local officials said.

Residents up to 20 miles away reported hearing the blast at about 11:19 a.m. at the Kleen Power Plant in Middletown, a suburb of Hartford, Connecticut.

“There is no present or continuing threat to anybody from either substances getting into the atmosphere or of a possible subsequent explosion,” Middletown Mayor Sebastian Giuliano said, adding terrorism has been ruled out.

He said plant workers were purging a natural gas pipeline when the explosion occurred.

“Urban search-and-rescue teams are on the premises … with dogs, attempting to locate and account for further victims,” Giuliano said.

It’s unknown how many people were working in the plant, which was about 95 percent complete, at the time of the explosion. Multiple contractors were involved in the project, Giuliano said, complicating efforts to account for those who may have been on the site.

“[Each contractor] has their own foreperson, their own employee list, so we’re trying to sort that out,” Giuliano said.

Deputy Fire Marshal Al Santostefano said later Sunday that no one has come forward with any names of missing people and dogs have not detected signs of life beneath the rubble left by the explosion.

The plant was expected to go online this summer, Giuliano said.

Santostefano initially said about 50 people, most of them construction workers, were working at the time, but Giuliano said “we don’t know that as a hard number right now.”

“What I’ve been told by the owners of the project is that there could be anywhere from 100 to 200 people working on the site on any given day,” Giuliano said.

But Santostefano later said the numbers Giuliano cited were weekday figures, and he repeated his estimate of 50 to 60 people at the site Sunday when the explosion occurred. He said he thought most of those escaped the blast.

A no-fly zone was established over the site because of the unstable structure, Gov. Jodi Rell announced Sunday night.

Middlesex Hospital in Middletown said it received 11 patients from the explosion. One patient with serious injuries was flown to a hospital in Hartford, and another was transferred to Yale New Haven Hospital, according to a statement on Middlesex’s Web site. Two others had minor injuries and were treated and released. The remaining seven patients sustained injuries “mainly to the extremities, including broken bones, blunt trauma and abdominal pains,” the statement said.

Emergency room physician Dr. Jonathan Bankoff told reporters that some patients reported being thrown 30 or 40 feet by the blast.

Two people were airlifted directly to the Hartford hospital from the scene, Middlesex spokesman R. Brian Albert said. A center was being set up at Middletown’s City Hall for relatives of plant workers, he said.

As of late Sunday afternoon, the hospital said it was not expecting more patients from the plant.

After the explosion, it took a while for emergency crews to get into the plant, Santostefano said, because the plant was on fire and the natural gas had to be turned off at the source. No major incidents at the site had been reported since construction began there a couple of years ago, he said.

People miles away reported hearing or feeling the blast.

“It felt like the house was shaking,” Peter Moore, who lives about 10 miles away in Durham, told CNN. He said he thought at first there had been a traffic accident on his street or there was a problem with his house.

Moore said his mother, who lives in Woodbridge, about 20 miles away from the plant, also said she heard the explosion, and said it “sounded like someone pounded on the back door a couple of times.”

“It was almost like an earthquake,” nearby resident Lynn Townsend told CNN affiliate WTNH. She said she heard the explosion and went outside to see “a very big, bright orange flame” between the plant’s two smokestacks, and immediately dialed 911.

“It really shook the house,” she said. “Everybody was scared. The kids started to cry.

Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance told WTNH his agency has received “an immense amount of inquiries” from residents who heard or felt the explosion.

If you or anyone you know was injured or killed in the power plant gas explosion, please feel free to contact the Hayes Firm online or call 1-800-603-6833.  We will work to find the best attorney in your area to advise you and fight for your rights. 

Posted December 23, 2009

By Larry Hartstein, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

A 32-year-old Lawrenceville woman has been charged with felony hit and run and DUI in an Interstate 85 crash that injured 13 developmentally disabled adults and their bus driver Wednesday.

Joy Christine Wilson was being held without bond at the Gwinnett County Jail. Additional charges are expected.

Witnesses told police Wilson was driving erratically, changing lanes frequently to bypass cars, before causing the 11:45 a.m. wreck in the northbound lanes just north of Pleasant Hill Road. Her black 1999 Honda Accord hit the back of a small bus operated by Norcross-based Just People Inc., and the bus lost control, police said. The bus skidded across several lanes and flipped on its side before colliding with the guardrail and righting itself.

The wreck shut down I-85 northbound for about three hours and left three people in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, nine others with serious injuries and two with minor injuries.

Five passengers were ejected. One was airlifted to Atlanta Medical Center. Most of the injured were taken to Gwinnett Medical Center.

Wilson pulled over briefly following the accident, but left before police arrived, Gwinnett police spokesman Officer Brian Kelly said. An hour later she was apprehended as she attempted to return to the scene.

A family member, said Kelly, convinced her to turn herself in. At the same time, police found her car in an unincorporated area of Lawrenceville.

“Wilson was taken into custody at Satellite and Steve Reynolds Boulevard,” said Kelly.

According to its Web site, Just People “provides a wide variety of support services to adults with developmental disabilities.”

The bus was taking “special-needs individuals to an art class in Hoschton,” said Kelly.

The person answering the phone at the Just People office Wednesday afternoon said the agency had no comment on the wreck.

Posted December 21, 2009

By Mike McIntire, the New York Times

By the time Bryan Lee headed to work along Highway 51 in Texas on Sept. 15, 2005, the road-building industry and its government overseers were painfully aware of a deadly, though easily corrected, construction hazard: pavement-edge drop-offs.

Accidents involving dangerous drop-offs kill about 160 people and injure 11,000 each year. Numerous studies have shown that the steeper the drop-off, the greater the danger.

In Texas in 2002, seven people were killed when a car slipped off a sharp edge of roadway and onto the shoulder, causing the driver to overcorrect into the path of a minivan. Four years before, six people died in a succession of accidents in another Texas work zone, where contractors had failed to smooth out the edge of a newly paved lane.

Yet when the contractors repaving Highway 51 west of Fort Worth discovered that they lacked sufficient equipment, they decided to pave only part of the roadway and finish the rest days later, leaving a sharp drop-off that ran for miles within the travel lane. A state inspector warned that it was dangerous, but no one — not his superiors, not the contractor — listened.

Two days after that warning, Mr. Lee, a 26-year-old oil field worker with a wife and two young sons, rounded a curve in the early-morning darkness, and the wheels of his Suzuki motorcycle slid off the asphalt edge. He tumbled from the bike and was run over by a pickup truck.

The deadly accident was one of thousands in highway work zones across the country that have killed at least 4,700 people — more than two a day — and injured 200,000 in the last five years alone. Ubiquitous annoyances of on-the-go American life, work zones are sometimes death traps, too.

Behind this human toll is a litany of mundane hazards: concrete barriers in the wrong position, obsolete lane markings left in place, warning signs never deployed.

Yet there are virtually no laws or regulations mandating safety measures in work zones. There are standards, but they are loosely enforced and differ from state to state. As a result, there are few penalties levied against contractors when, because of ignorance, carelessness or a desire to save money, guidelines are violated. Problem contractors often just keep on getting hired, and dangerous practices remain uncorrected, sometimes for years.

Ultimately, the hazards persist through a kind of collective indifference, a presumption that, given the crush of traffic and the vagaries of driver behavior, accidents happen.

But interviews and internal government documents, along with a review of more than 100 legal cases involving work zone crashes around the country, illuminate a more complex calculus of blame — one that often encompasses the actions of the construction industry and its regulators as well.

“A lot of work-zone crashes are entirely preventable,” said David Holstein, Ohio’s chief traffic engineer. “It’s not explainable by just driver error or inattention. We can intervene to keep them from happening.”

After transportation officials in Ohio created a system to monitor work-zone crashes in real time, they were startled to discover that the presence of construction caused accident rates to jump as much as 70 percent, Mr. Holstein said.

“We were seeing that crashes were happening day after day after day, and nothing was being done about it,” he said. “Sometimes there were hundreds of crashes over the life of a project.”

Now the stakes are increasing, as $27 billion from President Obama’s economic stimulus package is prompting a nationwide boom in highway construction. Federal transportation officials are concerned that work-zone fatalities, after declining in recent years along with traffic deaths in general, could rise again.

“The number of people killed as a result of crashes in work zones remains significant,” the Federal Highway Administration says on its Web site. “Safety and mobility impacts from work zones will likely be magnified with the infusion of a large number of new projects.”

Transportation officials are responding pretty much as they always have: by focusing primarily on drivers. States have raised fines for speeding in work zones, cracked down on drunken or distracted drivers and stiffened penalties for killing or injuring highway workers, even though roughly 85 percent of those killed in work zones are motorists.

Posted December 18, 2009

By: channel3000.com

MERRIMAC, Wis. — Fourteen people were hurt after a ski lift accident at the Devil’s Head resort near the Town of Merrimac on Thursday night.

The Sauk County Sheriff’s Department said that the state Department of Commerce has taken over an investigation into a malfunctioning chair lift at resort. A full chair lift allegedly stopped and began going backward at a high rate of speed on Thursday night at about 7 p.m., sending some riders jumping off their seats.

Officials with local hospitals said they treated a total of 14 people for injuries in connection with the incident, and two were kept overnight for observation, including one with an ankle fracture. They said that most of the victims were listed in fair condition upon their arrival to both St. Clare Hospital in Baraboo and Sauk Prairie Memorial Hospital in Sauk City.

On Thursday night, Devil’s Head general manager Joe Vittengl said an investigation into what went wrong would begin Friday at daybreak.

“With light, we’ll be able to get into that chair lift and see anything that malfunctioned or see if there was ice or anything that caused a problem. And right now in the darkness, it’s more difficult to determine what would have occurred,” he said.

Meister at least three of the victims were seriously injured in the accident, but weren’t critically hurt. He said that seven apparently had minor injuries. He didn’t have details on the ages of the victims or the nature of their injuries.

Authorities said that they didn’t know exactly how many people were aboard when it started going backward.

Witnesses described the chaos and said some people on the chair lift jumped off.

“We were like 20 feet away from getting off the lift and the lift started going backward pretty fast,” said Amir Shadlu, a Madison resident who jumped off the lift. “We saw a lot of people jump from farther and they didn’t even take their boards off, so I don’t know how they made it, but we made it out okay.”

Lyndon resident Jason Lucht also said he jumped off the lift about 25 feet to the ground below.

“Everyone is yelling jump and I’m like, ‘Oh, we got to get off.’ So, we just jumped off and it was pretty scary, but we got off just fine,” said Lucht.

The popular resort was having a deal on lift tickets Thursday night when the lift failed.

“The opposite side of where you get on the lift was pretty much destroyed because when the chairs hang down, they would have been accelerated and being swung out like this and the whole roof on that side was gone,” said Matt Dederich, a skier from Madison who was stuck on the lift.

“We didn’t even get on the hill, we didn’t go down once,” said Nicole Bendell, of Madison.

There were 12 people still on the lift as of 8:45 p.m., nearly two hours after the initial incident, waiting to be evacuated. Meister said emergency responders finished evacuating the lift just after 9 p.m.

T.J. Versace, 28, of Madison, said he was about 12 feet away and heading toward the ski lift and preparing to get on when the accident happened.

“Something happened and it looked like it was going backwards. It was like a fire spark everywhere and all the seats are off the track and it’s going backwards and people are jumping, and everyone is like, ‘Just jump, jump, jump,’ and people are jumping off the chair,” Versace said.

Four EMS agencies responded to the scene.

“The whole parking lot is all lights everywhere (with) police and fire people. Parents are showing up and they want to see their kids,” Versace said. “When I was getting into my car there were parents pulling up and yelling at the staff, ‘Where is my kid? I want to see my kid.’”

Merrimac is about 20 miles northwest of Madison. 

Posted December 11, 2009

By Boston.com

The state’s highest court has upheld workers’ compensation coverage for a Peabody High School teacher who was injured in a skiing accident on a field trip.

The Supreme Judicial Court, in a four-page decision written by Justice Judith Cowin, says it concluded that a teacher acting as a chaperone on a school-sponsored activity is “acting in the course of her employment.”

The city of Peabody had claimed that Karen Sikorski, who injuried her shoulder in a fall, was not entitled to workers’ compensation because she was voluntarily participating in a recreational activity during the 2004 ski trip.

Posted December 10, 2009

By: Collin Bishop, wgrz.com

LANCASTER, NY – New York State Police say a double-decker Megabus was involved in a weather-related accident on the I-90 early Thursday morning.

Captain Mike Nigrelli tells 2 On Your Side the cause of the accident appears to be an unsafe lane change combined with weather conditions.

It was snowing, and there were high winds at the time of the crash.

According to State Police, 12 passengers and one driver were on board.  Seven people were taken to ECMC.  The driver and one passenger were sent to Millard Fillmore Suburban Hospital.  Four people were treated at the scene.  The most serious injury was a broken shoulder. 

The accident happened around 3:15 a.m. on the I-90 westbound near the Lancaster/Depew exit.

The bus was traveling from New York City to Toronto.

No charges have been filed against the driver at this time.

By The Associated Press

Posted November 23, 2009

A Philadelphia jury has ordered Wyeth Pharmaceuticals to pay a woman $75 million in punitive damages after finding a link between her breast cancer and a hormone-replacement drug.

 The punitive damages in the case of Connie Barton were unsealed yesterday, the same day of a verdict in the case of Donna Kendall, who was awarded $6.3 million in compensatory damages and $28 million in punitive damages, said Esther Berezofsky, an attorney for Barton.

Last month, the jury awarded Barton $3.75 million in compensatory damages and found Wyeth willfully hid evidence of a cancer link.

 The punitive award for Barton, of Peoria, Ill., had been sealed until yesterday because Kendall’s case was being heard in the same courthouse. A handful of Prempro lawsuits have gone to trial out of several thousand filed across the country.

Wyeth, based in Madison, was acquired by New York drugmaker Pfizer Inc. for $68 billion last month. A spokesman for Pfizer said the company will challenge both verdicts.

“We are disappointed with the verdicts in these cases,” Pfizer spokesman Chris Loder said in a statement.

“The company believes that neither the awards of punitive damages nor the liability verdicts were supported by the evidence or the law.”

Barton, 64, a retired hospital records clerk from Peoria, took Prempro for five years before her 2002 cancer diagnosis.

Wyeth, in court arguments, told jurors that women are now fully informed of the risks and benefits of Prempro, a combination estrogen-progestin pill.

Kendall, 66, of Decatur, Ill., took combination estrogen-progestin therapy from 1991 to 2002, including the last four years on Prempro, and was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, said her attorney, Tobi Millrood.

In her case, Wyeth was ordered to pay $16 million of the punitive damages and Upjohn Co., which is now a division of Pfizer, was ordered to pay $12 million, Millrood said.

“Today’s verdict is a resounding victory not only for Donna Kendall but for women around the country,” Millrood said.

Sales of Prempro have plummeted since 2002 when a large federal health study, the Women’s Health Initiative, was stopped when researchers saw more breast cancers in those on Prempro.

A study this year shows that lung cancer seems more likely to prove fatal in women who are taking the combination drug.