There was a second accident on the Metro Red Line in Washington this past weekend, less than a week from the first deadly accident, according to The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/02/AR2010020203678.html
In the most recent crash 20 Metro workers were riding into a tunnel on a vehicle with a flatbed car attached to it. The work zone was near the Medical Center Station. The accident happened last Saturday, January 30.
The vehicle with the workers apparently hit some ice and sped out of control, hitting a pickup truck that was on the rails. That pickup truck then crashed into three vehicles, The Washington Post reported.
The newspaper questioned why accident wasn’t reported to the Metro’s safety office until 30 hours after it happened. The Washington Post said that under federal regulations, the Metro must notify the Tri-State Oversight Committee within two hours when there is a rail vehicle involved in any accident. The committee watches over Metro safety.
No injuries were reported in Saturday’s accident, but the man operating the vehicle that went out of control and a supervisor were given mandatory alcohol and drug tests.
On Jan. 26 there was another accident involving a so-called high-rail vehicle, which is a pickup truck on metal runners. In that accident, two Metro employees were struck and killed by a high-rail vehicle that was backing up on the Red Line, The Washington Post reported.
New Federal Guidelines Bar Commercial Truck and Bus Drivers From Texting
This week the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) issued a nationwide ban that prohibits commercial truck and bus drivers from texting while they’re on the job behind the wheel.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the announcement about the ban, which is aimed at preventing accidents caused by distracted truck and bus drivers. The ban took effect immediately.
“We want the drivers of big rigs and buses and those who share the roads with them to be safe,” LaHood said in a press release, http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2010/dot1410.htm. “This is an important safety step, and we will be taking more to eliminate the threat of distracted driving,”
News of the ban was widely reported by the national media, including The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/technology/27distracted.html, and CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/26/trucks.texting.ban/?hpt=T1.
Truckers or bus drivers who violate the new guidelines will be subject to civil or criminal penalties of up to $2,750.
Right now 19 states bar drivers from texting behind the wheel, according to the Ventura, Calif., County Star, http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/jan/28/an-obvious-direction-to-go/?print=1.
Its story points out that a tragic 2008 Metrolink commuter train crash, which killed 25 people and injured 135, was mainly blamed on a train engineer texting just prior to the crash.
That story also cites a July study by the Virgina Tech Transportation Institute, which determined that drivers are six times more likely to get in an accident if they are talking or texting on their cell. That survey also found that truckers using a mobile device are 23 times more likely to have a collision.
DOT this week cited Research by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which found that drivers who send and receive text messages take their eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds out of every 6 seconds while texting.
“At 55 miles per hour, this means that the driver is traveling the length of a football field, including the end zones, without looking at the road,” the DOT press release says. “Drivers who text while driving are more than 20 times more likely to get in an accident than non-distracted drivers. Because of the safety risks associated with the use of electronic devices while driving, FMCSA is also working on additional regulatory measures that will be announced in the coming months.”
During the September Distracted Driving Summit, LaHood announced that DOT would pursue regulatory action, as well as rulemakings, to reduce the risks posed by distracted driving.
President Obama also signed an Executive Order directing federal employees not to engage in text messaging while driving government-owned vehicles or with government-owned equipment. Federal employees were required to comply with the ban starting Dec. 30.
The regulatory guidance the DOT texting ban are now in the Federal Register.
DOT also has a Web site, http://distraction.gov, where it warns drivers about the perils of driving while using their cell phones, eating, adjusting their radio or text messaging.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood made the announcement about the ban, which is aimed at preventing accidents caused by distracted truck and bus drivers. The ban took effect immediately.
“We want the drivers of big rigs and buses and those who share the roads with them to be safe,” LaHood said in a press release, http://www.dot.gov/affairs/2010/dot1410.htm. “This is an important safety step, and we will be taking more to eliminate the threat of distracted driving,”
News of the ban was widely reported by the national media, including The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/27/technology/27distracted.html, and CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/26/trucks.texting.ban/?hpt=T1.
Truckers or bus drivers who violate the new guidelines will be subject to civil or criminal penalties of up to $2,750.
Right now 19 states bar drivers from texting behind the wheel, according to the Ventura, Calif., County Star, http://www.vcstar.com/news/2010/jan/28/an-obvious-direction-to-go/?print=1.
Its story points out that a tragic 2008 Metrolink commuter train crash, which killed 25 people and injured 135, was mainly blamed on a train engineer texting just prior to the crash.
That story also cites a July study by the Virgina Tech Transportation Institute, which determined that drivers are six times more likely to get in an accident if they are talking or texting on their cell. That survey also found that truckers using a mobile device are 23 times more likely to have a collision.
DOT this week cited Research by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA), which found that drivers who send and receive text messages take their eyes off the road for an average of 4.6 seconds out of every 6 seconds while texting.
“At 55 miles per hour, this means that the driver is traveling the length of a football field, including the end zones, without looking at the road,” the DOT press release says. “Drivers who text while driving are more than 20 times more likely to get in an accident than non-distracted drivers. Because of the safety risks associated with the use of electronic devices while driving, FMCSA is also working on additional regulatory measures that will be announced in the coming months.”
During the September Distracted Driving Summit, LaHood announced that DOT would pursue regulatory action, as well as rulemakings, to reduce the risks posed by distracted driving.
President Obama also signed an Executive Order directing federal employees not to engage in text messaging while driving government-owned vehicles or with government-owned equipment. Federal employees were required to comply with the ban starting Dec. 30.
The regulatory guidance the DOT texting ban are now in the Federal Register.
DOT also has a Web site, http://distraction.gov, where it warns drivers about the perils of driving while using their cell phones, eating, adjusting their radio or text messaging.
Ship helmsman sentenced to 10 months for oil spill
Just weeks after the final decision in the Exxon Valdez case, another (fortunately) smaller oil spill makes the news with the sentencing of to the helsman of the Cosco Busan. The tanker was involved in an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in 2007.
For more on the Exxon Valdez case resolution in June, go to http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon-valdez16-2009jun16,0,7865562.story
For the 2008 Supreme Court decision in the case, go to http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-219.pdf
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://fishtail.tv
http://tbilaw.com
Date: 7/17/2009 6:54 PM
JARED GRIGSBY,Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The helmsman of a cargo ship that set off a major environmental disaster in the San Francisco Bay was sentenced Friday to 10 months in prison.
John Cota pleaded guilty in March to two misdemeanor environmental crimes of illegally discharging oil in the bay and killing thousands of birds.
Cota apologized to the court and to the “people of the Bay Area for the damage I have caused.”
Cota’s attorney, Jeff Bornstein, had asked U.S. District Judge Susan Illston to impose a two-month sentence.
Bornstein argued that his client wasn’t the only person responsible for the Nov. 7, 2007, oil spill that poured more than 53,000 gallons of oil into the water after the 901-foot Cosco Busan struck a tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in heavy fog. The spill killed 2,000 birds, fouled dozens of miles of coastline and cost commercial fishermen millions of dollars in lost revenue.
A poorly trained Chinese crew, language barriers and others factors beyond Cota’s control contributed to the accident, Bornstein said.
“This was an accident, a chain of errors and lots of people played a role in it,” Bornstein said.
Illston, however, said Cota was hired to guide the ship out of the San Francisco Bay because of his extensive knowledge of the region and should have known where the bridge was located.
“You have a structure that has not moved from its position for many, many years,” she said.
The judge also agreed with prosecutors that Cota made several disastrously poor decisions while piloting the ship. Authorities have said he shouldn’t have departed in extreme fog when pilots of six other large vessels decided not to, failed to have a discussion with the ship’s master to review the transit plan and failed to notify the Coast Guard that the ship’s radar was unreliable.
“I know there is a lot of blame to go around,” Illston said. “But, I think Capt. Cota was right in the middle of it.”
About a dozen family and friends from Cota’s hometown of Petaluma crowded into the courtroom to also urge the judge for a more lenient sentence than the 10 months demanded by federal prosecutors.
Teresa Barrett, Cota’s wife, told the judge that the family has spent more than $500,000 on legal fees and faced even more financial punishment because of several lawsuits pending against Cota from fishermen and others seeking to recover expenses caused by the spill.
“We risk losing the only home our sons have known,” she said before breaking down in tears.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
For more on the Exxon Valdez case resolution in June, go to http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-exxon-valdez16-2009jun16,0,7865562.story
For the 2008 Supreme Court decision in the case, go to http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-219.pdf
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://fishtail.tv
http://tbilaw.com
Date: 7/17/2009 6:54 PM
JARED GRIGSBY,Associated Press Writer
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The helmsman of a cargo ship that set off a major environmental disaster in the San Francisco Bay was sentenced Friday to 10 months in prison.
John Cota pleaded guilty in March to two misdemeanor environmental crimes of illegally discharging oil in the bay and killing thousands of birds.
Cota apologized to the court and to the “people of the Bay Area for the damage I have caused.”
Cota’s attorney, Jeff Bornstein, had asked U.S. District Judge Susan Illston to impose a two-month sentence.
Bornstein argued that his client wasn’t the only person responsible for the Nov. 7, 2007, oil spill that poured more than 53,000 gallons of oil into the water after the 901-foot Cosco Busan struck a tower of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in heavy fog. The spill killed 2,000 birds, fouled dozens of miles of coastline and cost commercial fishermen millions of dollars in lost revenue.
A poorly trained Chinese crew, language barriers and others factors beyond Cota’s control contributed to the accident, Bornstein said.
“This was an accident, a chain of errors and lots of people played a role in it,” Bornstein said.
Illston, however, said Cota was hired to guide the ship out of the San Francisco Bay because of his extensive knowledge of the region and should have known where the bridge was located.
“You have a structure that has not moved from its position for many, many years,” she said.
The judge also agreed with prosecutors that Cota made several disastrously poor decisions while piloting the ship. Authorities have said he shouldn’t have departed in extreme fog when pilots of six other large vessels decided not to, failed to have a discussion with the ship’s master to review the transit plan and failed to notify the Coast Guard that the ship’s radar was unreliable.
“I know there is a lot of blame to go around,” Illston said. “But, I think Capt. Cota was right in the middle of it.”
About a dozen family and friends from Cota’s hometown of Petaluma crowded into the courtroom to also urge the judge for a more lenient sentence than the 10 months demanded by federal prosecutors.
Teresa Barrett, Cota’s wife, told the judge that the family has spent more than $500,000 on legal fees and faced even more financial punishment because of several lawsuits pending against Cota from fishermen and others seeking to recover expenses caused by the spill.
“We risk losing the only home our sons have known,” she said before breaking down in tears.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Jackson ex-wife shows interest in custody of kids
The Michael Jackson custody issue demonstrates all that is wrong with the way in which this eccentric great man, interfaced with the world and the laws that govern it. If his ex-wife asserts a legitimate claim for custody, it will mark new ground, opening issues as to whether a woman who has terminated her parental rights, should still be given the opportunity to assert them, in absence of better alternatives. Then there is the issue of what rights the true biological parents should have, again when there really is no suitable other person with a better claim.
Should a child be raised by the surviving parent, regardless of a prior custody determination when the other parent dies? If a child better off being raised by an elderly grandparent than its true parent? To do so, the law would have to discard the legal fiction imposed at the time of the termination, but isn’t that the only truly equitable decision?
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://subtlebraininjury.com
http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com
http://vestibulardisorder.com
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2009
Date: 7/2/2009 9:43 PM
ANTHONY MCCARTNEY,AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The future of Michael Jackson’s children was thrown into question Thursday when his ex-wife emerged and won a delay in a custody hearing while she decides whether she wants to raise her two offspring.
It was the first legal move from Deborah Rowe since the entertainer’s death. Jackson’s will asks for his mother, Katherine, to get permanent custody of all three of his children.
Rowe, who met Jackson as a receptionist in the office of his dermatologist, has characterized their relationship as strictly for the purpose of birthing Jackson children. She is the mother of his two oldest children and received $8.5 million in their divorce, according to court records. His youngest child was conceived with a surrogate.
She has spent very little time with her son Michael Joseph Jr., known as Prince Michael, 12; and daughter Paris Michael Katherine, 11. But Rowe also has opposed the idea of Katherine Jackson getting custody of her children when it came up in the past.
Rowe’s attorney, Eric M. George, said Thursday she had not decided whether to seek custody.
Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff rescheduled a guardianship hearing for July 13 at the request of attorneys for Rowe and for Katherine Jackson, 79, who has temporary guardianship of her son’s children.
The identity of the surrogate mother of the singer’s youngest child, 7-year-old son Prince Michael II, has never been revealed.
Jackson’s public memorial was set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, according to a press release from the office of the Jackson family’s publicist.
Randy Phillips, chief executive of AEG Live, which owns the Staples Center and was Jackson’s promoter, said tickets would be free. He was not sure how they would be distributed.
But Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine said the Jackson family should consider delaying the public memorial to allow more time to plan. He also said the cash-strapped city doesn’t have the money to pay police overtime.
“If you can imagine 100,000 people show up and you have 20,000 capacity (at the Staples Center), there is not sufficient room. Now you have a crowd-control problem,” he said. With the July Fourth holiday weekend “it’s the worst time … to work something out.”
Another court hearing will proceed as planned Monday on who will take temporary control of Jackson’s estate. He left all his assets to the Michael Jackson Family Trust.
A person familiar with the details of the trust said it would be shared between his mother, who gets 40 percent, his three children, who together get 40 percent, and charities for children, which would receive 20 percent. The charities will be determined later by the trust.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.
Authorities also were investigating allegations that the 50-year-old Jackson had been consuming painkillers, sedatives and antidepressants.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown said his office was helping Los Angeles police investigate the possible involvement of prescription drugs in Jackson’s death.
His Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement is searching a state database that tracks doctors who prescribe controlled substances, how much and to whom.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration also has joined the investigation. The Los Angeles Police Department asked the DEA to help, a law enforcement official in Washington told the AP on condition of anonymity because of the investigation’s sensitivity.
In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Jackson’s brother Jermaine said he would be “hurt” if toxicology reports showed his younger brother abused prescription drugs.
“In this business, the pressures and things that you go through, you never know what one turns to,” he said.
___
AP writers Michael R. Blood, Beth Harris in Los Angeles; Michele Salcedo in Washington; contributed to this story.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
Should a child be raised by the surviving parent, regardless of a prior custody determination when the other parent dies? If a child better off being raised by an elderly grandparent than its true parent? To do so, the law would have to discard the legal fiction imposed at the time of the termination, but isn’t that the only truly equitable decision?
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://subtlebraininjury.com
http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com
http://vestibulardisorder.com
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2009
Date: 7/2/2009 9:43 PM
ANTHONY MCCARTNEY,AP Entertainment Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — The future of Michael Jackson’s children was thrown into question Thursday when his ex-wife emerged and won a delay in a custody hearing while she decides whether she wants to raise her two offspring.
It was the first legal move from Deborah Rowe since the entertainer’s death. Jackson’s will asks for his mother, Katherine, to get permanent custody of all three of his children.
Rowe, who met Jackson as a receptionist in the office of his dermatologist, has characterized their relationship as strictly for the purpose of birthing Jackson children. She is the mother of his two oldest children and received $8.5 million in their divorce, according to court records. His youngest child was conceived with a surrogate.
She has spent very little time with her son Michael Joseph Jr., known as Prince Michael, 12; and daughter Paris Michael Katherine, 11. But Rowe also has opposed the idea of Katherine Jackson getting custody of her children when it came up in the past.
Rowe’s attorney, Eric M. George, said Thursday she had not decided whether to seek custody.
Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff rescheduled a guardianship hearing for July 13 at the request of attorneys for Rowe and for Katherine Jackson, 79, who has temporary guardianship of her son’s children.
The identity of the surrogate mother of the singer’s youngest child, 7-year-old son Prince Michael II, has never been revealed.
Jackson’s public memorial was set for 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles, according to a press release from the office of the Jackson family’s publicist.
Randy Phillips, chief executive of AEG Live, which owns the Staples Center and was Jackson’s promoter, said tickets would be free. He was not sure how they would be distributed.
But Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine said the Jackson family should consider delaying the public memorial to allow more time to plan. He also said the cash-strapped city doesn’t have the money to pay police overtime.
“If you can imagine 100,000 people show up and you have 20,000 capacity (at the Staples Center), there is not sufficient room. Now you have a crowd-control problem,” he said. With the July Fourth holiday weekend “it’s the worst time … to work something out.”
Another court hearing will proceed as planned Monday on who will take temporary control of Jackson’s estate. He left all his assets to the Michael Jackson Family Trust.
A person familiar with the details of the trust said it would be shared between his mother, who gets 40 percent, his three children, who together get 40 percent, and charities for children, which would receive 20 percent. The charities will be determined later by the trust.
The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity.
Authorities also were investigating allegations that the 50-year-old Jackson had been consuming painkillers, sedatives and antidepressants.
California Attorney General Jerry Brown said his office was helping Los Angeles police investigate the possible involvement of prescription drugs in Jackson’s death.
His Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement is searching a state database that tracks doctors who prescribe controlled substances, how much and to whom.
The federal Drug Enforcement Administration also has joined the investigation. The Los Angeles Police Department asked the DEA to help, a law enforcement official in Washington told the AP on condition of anonymity because of the investigation’s sensitivity.
In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Jackson’s brother Jermaine said he would be “hurt” if toxicology reports showed his younger brother abused prescription drugs.
“In this business, the pressures and things that you go through, you never know what one turns to,” he said.
___
AP writers Michael R. Blood, Beth Harris in Los Angeles; Michele Salcedo in Washington; contributed to this story.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.
DMV: Driver in Calif. crash lacked bus license
Date: 10/7/2008 8:52 PM
By SAMANTHA YOUNG
Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) _ The bus that crashed and killed eight people on a Northern California road was driven by a man who wasn’t properly licensed and owned by another man who had claimed to be the vehicle’s only driver, state officials said Tuesday.
The California Highway Patrol is investigating whether the bus that crashed Sunday north of Sacramento was inspected annually, as required by law. They also are looking at whether drugs or alcohol were a factor.
The bus driver, 52-year-old Quintin Watts, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence Monday while he was still hospitalized for his injuries. Watts didn’t have the proper license to carry more than 10 passengers, said Mike Marando, a DMV spokesman.
“He wasn’t authorized to drive a bus in the state of California,” Marando explained. “It is the responsibility of the bus company owner to make sure the driver is properly licensed, and that was not the case here.”
Patrol officers believe the bus owner was Daniel Cobb, 68, who died in the crash. State public records show that Cobb was insured and had a valid permit from the Public Utilities Commission to operate a bus service.
Under the permit, however, Cobb listed only himself and not Watts as the sole driver of the single bus he had registered with the commission, agency officials said.
“Mr. Cobb certified under penalty of perjury that he had no employees and was therefore not required to maintain workers’ compensation insurance,” said Paul Wuerstle, the commission’s head of transportation enforcement.
A witness said the bus carrying 42 passengers to Colusa Casino Resort drifted off a rural two-lane road before the driver “overcorrected” and swerved back. It overturned and rolled completely over, ending up on its wheels facing the opposite direction. About 30 people were injured. Many of the passengers were Laotian seniors.
The bus had an invalid license plate, the CHP said.
Watts’ family issued a statement through Woodland Hospital, where he is recovering from injuries in the crash.
“We would like to share our condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and also let everyone know we are praying for those who are still in the hospital,” the statement said.
Watts’ adoptive parents said they were told by friends and family members that Cobb was Watts’ stepfather. Cobb had been married to Watts’ biological mother before she died about 10 years ago, said Cleval Watts, who adopted Quintin Watts when he was 6 months old.
He added that Quintin Watts was diabetic and taking insulin.
Passengers who survived the crash tell social workers that the bus driver appeared to have dozed off and passengers tried to warn him before the vehicle rolled off the road and tumbled into a drainage ditch.
“The bus driver was sleepy and the bus swung to the left and right side. And they were yelling at him on the third swing when it turned over,” said Theresa Saechao of Lao Family Community Development of Sacramento.
Safety advocates and bus industry experts said Tuesday tour bus companies that transport gamblers to casinos don’t always follow government regulations designed to assure passenger safety.
“Some of these rogue operations literally do pickups in alleys where they are trying to keep out of the sight of federal and state authorities,” said Eron Shosteck, spokesman at the American Bus Association, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that represents about 1,000 motorcoach and tour companies in the U.S. and Canada.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulates buses that cross state lines, but tour buses that operate in only one state such as Cobbs Bus Service are a state responsibility.
All commercial buses that travel within California undergo annual inspections by the highway patrol, but in cases where companies don’t have bus terminals, CHP spokesman Scott Johnson said, “we don’t go. If there’s no terminal they don’t respond.”
A bus terminal couldn’t be located for Cobbs Bus Service, which listed a Modesto church and a residence in Sacramento as its headquarters.
Still, the highway patrol told the Public Utilities Commission in October 2007 that Cobb’s operation had passed all necessary inspections and that his permit could be renewed for another three years, Wuerstle said.
Cobb had a permit to operate a bus service in the state since 1974 and had no indications on his record of any past safety violations, Wuerstle said. The commission is not automatically notified if a bus driver has been in an accident, he said.
Records show Watts, of Stockton, had been cited for speeding and other violations that resulted in loss of his license for nearly two years. He regained his driving privileges last January.
___
Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in San Francisco and Judy Lin in Sacramento contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By SAMANTHA YOUNG
Associated Press Writer
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) _ The bus that crashed and killed eight people on a Northern California road was driven by a man who wasn’t properly licensed and owned by another man who had claimed to be the vehicle’s only driver, state officials said Tuesday.
The California Highway Patrol is investigating whether the bus that crashed Sunday north of Sacramento was inspected annually, as required by law. They also are looking at whether drugs or alcohol were a factor.
The bus driver, 52-year-old Quintin Watts, was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence Monday while he was still hospitalized for his injuries. Watts didn’t have the proper license to carry more than 10 passengers, said Mike Marando, a DMV spokesman.
“He wasn’t authorized to drive a bus in the state of California,” Marando explained. “It is the responsibility of the bus company owner to make sure the driver is properly licensed, and that was not the case here.”
Patrol officers believe the bus owner was Daniel Cobb, 68, who died in the crash. State public records show that Cobb was insured and had a valid permit from the Public Utilities Commission to operate a bus service.
Under the permit, however, Cobb listed only himself and not Watts as the sole driver of the single bus he had registered with the commission, agency officials said.
“Mr. Cobb certified under penalty of perjury that he had no employees and was therefore not required to maintain workers’ compensation insurance,” said Paul Wuerstle, the commission’s head of transportation enforcement.
A witness said the bus carrying 42 passengers to Colusa Casino Resort drifted off a rural two-lane road before the driver “overcorrected” and swerved back. It overturned and rolled completely over, ending up on its wheels facing the opposite direction. About 30 people were injured. Many of the passengers were Laotian seniors.
The bus had an invalid license plate, the CHP said.
Watts’ family issued a statement through Woodland Hospital, where he is recovering from injuries in the crash.
“We would like to share our condolences to those who have lost their loved ones and also let everyone know we are praying for those who are still in the hospital,” the statement said.
Watts’ adoptive parents said they were told by friends and family members that Cobb was Watts’ stepfather. Cobb had been married to Watts’ biological mother before she died about 10 years ago, said Cleval Watts, who adopted Quintin Watts when he was 6 months old.
He added that Quintin Watts was diabetic and taking insulin.
Passengers who survived the crash tell social workers that the bus driver appeared to have dozed off and passengers tried to warn him before the vehicle rolled off the road and tumbled into a drainage ditch.
“The bus driver was sleepy and the bus swung to the left and right side. And they were yelling at him on the third swing when it turned over,” said Theresa Saechao of Lao Family Community Development of Sacramento.
Safety advocates and bus industry experts said Tuesday tour bus companies that transport gamblers to casinos don’t always follow government regulations designed to assure passenger safety.
“Some of these rogue operations literally do pickups in alleys where they are trying to keep out of the sight of federal and state authorities,” said Eron Shosteck, spokesman at the American Bus Association, a Washington, D.C.,-based group that represents about 1,000 motorcoach and tour companies in the U.S. and Canada.
The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration regulates buses that cross state lines, but tour buses that operate in only one state such as Cobbs Bus Service are a state responsibility.
All commercial buses that travel within California undergo annual inspections by the highway patrol, but in cases where companies don’t have bus terminals, CHP spokesman Scott Johnson said, “we don’t go. If there’s no terminal they don’t respond.”
A bus terminal couldn’t be located for Cobbs Bus Service, which listed a Modesto church and a residence in Sacramento as its headquarters.
Still, the highway patrol told the Public Utilities Commission in October 2007 that Cobb’s operation had passed all necessary inspections and that his permit could be renewed for another three years, Wuerstle said.
Cobb had a permit to operate a bus service in the state since 1974 and had no indications on his record of any past safety violations, Wuerstle said. The commission is not automatically notified if a bus driver has been in an accident, he said.
Records show Watts, of Stockton, had been cited for speeding and other violations that resulted in loss of his license for nearly two years. He regained his driving privileges last January.
___
Associated Press Writer Marcus Wohlsen in San Francisco and Judy Lin in Sacramento contributed to this report.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Train crash probe renews focus on texting dangers
Date: 9/16/2008 4:38 PM
By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP National Writer
One day last summer, Jim Messer, a Florida attorney, was nearly run off the road by another car. When he recovered, he says, he was able to see the other driver texting on her cell phone, balancing it on the wheel.
“There’s gotta be a law against this,” Messer thought. But there wasn’t — not in his state, anyway. He’s been working since then to get one passed.
Despite a general belief on the part of researchers and authorities that texting at the wheel, like other driver distractions, could be jeopardizing lives, only five states and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from doing it.
Now investigators are looking into whether texting may have played a role in the disastrous California train crash that killed 25. Two teenage train buffs told a TV station that the engineer, who was killed, sent them a text message a minute before the crash. A phone was not found.
For now, there is no data directly tying text messaging to traffic accidents. Though fully 74 percent of Americans aged 18-29 use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center, it’s a phenomenon that’s only a few years old.
But a 2006 government study found that distracted drivers of all sorts were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-crashes. And everyone knows that checking e-mails or sending a text message, just like talking on a cell phone or playing with the radio, can distract a driver. A researcher who worked on the 2006 study, Charlie Klauer of the Virginia Tech Traffic Institute, says the crash risk was doubled when a driver looked away from the road for two seconds out of six.
“Texting is potentially even more risky than speaking on a cell phone, because you’re not only taking your mind off the road — you’re taking your eyes off the road,” argues Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
But it’s very hard to prove, in the aftermath of a crash, that texting or e-mailing was the cause. Police in upstate New York found a series of messages sent and received from 17-year-old Bailey Goodman’s phone just before her sport utility vehicle slammed into a tractor-trailer one night in June last year, killing her and four friends who’d all just graduated from high school. But they couldn’t tell if she was the one using her phone.
It was enough for a state senator to propose a bill banning texting while driving in New York, where using a hand-held cell phone has been banned since 2001. The bill remains in committee. Only Alaska, Washington, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from texting, according to the IIHS; 12 other states have partial bans, such as drivers under 18 or bus drivers.
One emergency room doctor says he suspects most people don’t initiate text messages while driving — but can’t help themselves from responding to them.
“It’s hard to ignore the temptation,” says Dr. Mark Melrose of Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J., a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. “You think, this might be important, I’d better check. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, but you do it anyway.”
That’s an apt way to describe the habits of Liz Osaki, 23, who works at an advertising agency on the outskirts of Boston. Her daily commute is about an hour each way. And yes, she texts at the wheel, though mostly when she’s in traffic, or stopped at a light. Even when she’s not, “I promise I am still looking at the road,” she says.
The only mishaps Osaki reports are occasionally missing the moment a light turns from red to green, or not realizing as fast as she should that cars in front have braked suddenly. She argues that texting can actually be safer in the car than speaking on a cell phone.
“I think it’s less distracting because when I’m texting, I can always just throw the phone down,” she says. “You can’t do that in the middle of a phone conversation.”
More to the point is the fact that for Osaki, like many young Americans, texting has become second nature, often a preferred means of communication to speaking on the phone.
“I text to ask simple questions, and get simple answers,” she says. “Most of my friends don’t even like to check their voicemail.” Her recent phone bill was proof of Osaki’s habit: She had 1,000 text messages on it, she says. That’s more than 30 messages a day.
That’s nothing compared to Lily Brynes, a 17-year-old New Yorker who figures she texts about 100 times a day on weekends, less so during school. It’s almost as if talking on the phone has become awkward, she says — “and my whole generation hates voice mail.”
The teenager adds that even fights are conducted on the phone, in carefully calibrated language. “‘Love you’ — that’s a normal signoff between female friends,” she says. “If she says ‘Love u,’ she’s busy.’” And the initials “l” and “y”? “That means she’s angry.”
Lily’s mother, Karen Binder-Brynes, is in awe. “It’s amazing how this generation has created an entirely new language,” she says. And texting is clearly the territory of the young. The Pew Research survey, conducted in the spring, showed that while 78 percent of all adults own a cell phone, only 24 percent of those over 50 used it to text, and only 6 percent of those over 65.
Moreover, though three-quarters of the 18-29 age group use texting, the number is surely much higher among teenagers, who weren’t counted. Researchers add that U.S. teenagers still lag behind those overseas. An amazing 98 percent of teens in the developed world engage in texting, says Jeff Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.
“What Americans don’t realize quite yet is just what a natural, ingrained part of communication texting is,” says Cole. He notes that teenagers in some countries even prefer to write papers and letters on a 12-button phone keypad rather than the usual computer keyboard.
Does this mean that teens of the future will be able to text in their cars, without even looking down at their phones? Not likely. And safety advocates like Messer, in Florida, are pushing their legislatures to adopt bans across the country.
But Osaki, for one, is skeptical that such bans can work.
“I’m not really sure how it could be enforced,” she says. “And I feel like the younger generation is pretty good at getting away with stuff like this. I know how we work.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By JOCELYN NOVECK
AP National Writer
One day last summer, Jim Messer, a Florida attorney, was nearly run off the road by another car. When he recovered, he says, he was able to see the other driver texting on her cell phone, balancing it on the wheel.
“There’s gotta be a law against this,” Messer thought. But there wasn’t — not in his state, anyway. He’s been working since then to get one passed.
Despite a general belief on the part of researchers and authorities that texting at the wheel, like other driver distractions, could be jeopardizing lives, only five states and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from doing it.
Now investigators are looking into whether texting may have played a role in the disastrous California train crash that killed 25. Two teenage train buffs told a TV station that the engineer, who was killed, sent them a text message a minute before the crash. A phone was not found.
For now, there is no data directly tying text messaging to traffic accidents. Though fully 74 percent of Americans aged 18-29 use text messaging, according to the Pew Research Center, it’s a phenomenon that’s only a few years old.
But a 2006 government study found that distracted drivers of all sorts were involved in nearly eight out of 10 collisions or near-crashes. And everyone knows that checking e-mails or sending a text message, just like talking on a cell phone or playing with the radio, can distract a driver. A researcher who worked on the 2006 study, Charlie Klauer of the Virginia Tech Traffic Institute, says the crash risk was doubled when a driver looked away from the road for two seconds out of six.
“Texting is potentially even more risky than speaking on a cell phone, because you’re not only taking your mind off the road — you’re taking your eyes off the road,” argues Russ Rader of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
But it’s very hard to prove, in the aftermath of a crash, that texting or e-mailing was the cause. Police in upstate New York found a series of messages sent and received from 17-year-old Bailey Goodman’s phone just before her sport utility vehicle slammed into a tractor-trailer one night in June last year, killing her and four friends who’d all just graduated from high school. But they couldn’t tell if she was the one using her phone.
It was enough for a state senator to propose a bill banning texting while driving in New York, where using a hand-held cell phone has been banned since 2001. The bill remains in committee. Only Alaska, Washington, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Jersey and the District of Columbia currently ban all drivers from texting, according to the IIHS; 12 other states have partial bans, such as drivers under 18 or bus drivers.
One emergency room doctor says he suspects most people don’t initiate text messages while driving — but can’t help themselves from responding to them.
“It’s hard to ignore the temptation,” says Dr. Mark Melrose of Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, N.J., a spokesman for the American College of Emergency Physicians. “You think, this might be important, I’d better check. You know you shouldn’t be doing it, but you do it anyway.”
That’s an apt way to describe the habits of Liz Osaki, 23, who works at an advertising agency on the outskirts of Boston. Her daily commute is about an hour each way. And yes, she texts at the wheel, though mostly when she’s in traffic, or stopped at a light. Even when she’s not, “I promise I am still looking at the road,” she says.
The only mishaps Osaki reports are occasionally missing the moment a light turns from red to green, or not realizing as fast as she should that cars in front have braked suddenly. She argues that texting can actually be safer in the car than speaking on a cell phone.
“I think it’s less distracting because when I’m texting, I can always just throw the phone down,” she says. “You can’t do that in the middle of a phone conversation.”
More to the point is the fact that for Osaki, like many young Americans, texting has become second nature, often a preferred means of communication to speaking on the phone.
“I text to ask simple questions, and get simple answers,” she says. “Most of my friends don’t even like to check their voicemail.” Her recent phone bill was proof of Osaki’s habit: She had 1,000 text messages on it, she says. That’s more than 30 messages a day.
That’s nothing compared to Lily Brynes, a 17-year-old New Yorker who figures she texts about 100 times a day on weekends, less so during school. It’s almost as if talking on the phone has become awkward, she says — “and my whole generation hates voice mail.”
The teenager adds that even fights are conducted on the phone, in carefully calibrated language. “‘Love you’ — that’s a normal signoff between female friends,” she says. “If she says ‘Love u,’ she’s busy.’” And the initials “l” and “y”? “That means she’s angry.”
Lily’s mother, Karen Binder-Brynes, is in awe. “It’s amazing how this generation has created an entirely new language,” she says. And texting is clearly the territory of the young. The Pew Research survey, conducted in the spring, showed that while 78 percent of all adults own a cell phone, only 24 percent of those over 50 used it to text, and only 6 percent of those over 65.
Moreover, though three-quarters of the 18-29 age group use texting, the number is surely much higher among teenagers, who weren’t counted. Researchers add that U.S. teenagers still lag behind those overseas. An amazing 98 percent of teens in the developed world engage in texting, says Jeff Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California.
“What Americans don’t realize quite yet is just what a natural, ingrained part of communication texting is,” says Cole. He notes that teenagers in some countries even prefer to write papers and letters on a 12-button phone keypad rather than the usual computer keyboard.
Does this mean that teens of the future will be able to text in their cars, without even looking down at their phones? Not likely. And safety advocates like Messer, in Florida, are pushing their legislatures to adopt bans across the country.
But Osaki, for one, is skeptical that such bans can work.
“I’m not really sure how it could be enforced,” she says. “And I feel like the younger generation is pretty good at getting away with stuff like this. I know how we work.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Rail collision altered lives in and outside train
Date: 9/20/2008 1:52 PM
By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ It was shaping up as a perfect afternoon when Kipp Landis climbed aboard the doomed Metrolink 111 train at Union Station.
Landis had managed to get away from his law office early, giving him just enough time to catch the 3:35 p.m. train to Moorpark to coach his 5-year-old son Jett’s soccer team. Along with his briefcase, he was carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for his players.
Before leaving the station, train engineer Robert Sanchez, a diabetic, phoned in his dinner order to a deli just down the street from Metrolink’s Moorpark station, the last stop on his run. He told Hub Hoagies ‘N More owner Randy Richardson he’d be there about 4:30 p.m. to pick up the roast beef sandwich — no onion, no tomato, extra light mayo and Italian dressing.
Neither Sanchez nor Landis would make it to that final stop.
Sanchez would die in the cab of his locomotive after driving through a red light and head-on into a freight train, killing 24 passengers. Landis would join many of his fellow passengers at an emergency room, fighting for his life.
The tragedy of Sept. 12 would forever alter the lives of hundreds of people, from the 222 on board to those who should have been on the train but missed it, to the relatives of riders who were killed, to the veteran first-responders who labeled it the most horrific thing they’d ever seen.
For Landis, the ride home began uneventfully with him taking his usual seat in the train’s first car.
“It was a beautiful day, it was perfect,” he recalled, describing one of those idyllic, sun-splashed Southern California afternoons seen on postcards.
A Metrolink rider for nearly 13 years, he ignored warnings of friends who called the front of the train the “suicide car.” He figured he’d be safe as long as he sat with his back to the engine so that he wouldn’t pitch forward if the train hit something. It never occurred to him that the train might run head-on into an oncoming locomotive going 40 mph.
The first 45 minutes of the ride were uneventful. Landis chatted with a young woman he worried would doze off and miss her stop.
She got off at the Chatsworth station, and about two minutes later — 4:22 p.m. — the 42-year-old attorney and Moorpark planning commissioner heard a gigantic bang.
“The next thing I remember, I was telling myself to breathe,” Landis said from his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.
Minutes after the crash, Dr. Marc Eckstein was pulling up to his San Fernando Valley home when he heard a bulletin on the radio about a train crash.
Eckstein, medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department, put the car’s emergency lights and siren on and raced to the scene 10 minutes away. A veteran of earthquakes, deadly fires and a 2005 Metrolink train crash that killed 11 people, Eckstein was stunned by what he saw.
“I’ve been doing emergency medicine for 25 years,” since he was a teenage paramedic in New York in the 1980s, said Eckstein, 44. “I have never seen so much carnage like this in one place in my career.”
Firefighters from nearby Station 77 could see smoke rising from the freight train’s locomotive as they arrived. It was engulfed by flames and two of its crew members were trapped inside and frantically pounding on the windshield for help.
“That was a challenge, getting through that front windshield, because it’s essentially like bulletproof glass. And they got those guys out, saved their lives,” said fire Capt. Thomas Moore, 49. He said firefighters try to focus on moments like those rather than dwell on the people they couldn’t save.
Near the fire, the Metrolink’s locomotive was embedded in the first passenger car. Eckstein could see bodies of several riders ripped to pieces and intertwined with metal debris from the train. Some were stacked on top of injured passengers.
Among the dead was Alan Buckley, 59, who may have been Metrolink’s biggest fan. He was riding from his home in Simi Valley to his job as a mechanic for the city of Burbank since 1992, the year the agency inaugurated commuter rail service.
His father had been a railroad switchman and he had been fascinated with trains since he was a child. He loved trains so much that he once sent his mother a postcard of the one he rode with the words: ‘This is the train I take back and forth to work. The greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
“And that’s what ended up killing him,” said his son, Jeff Buckley, his voice choked with emotion.
Like Landis, Buckley had been seated in the front car. He rode in the back on the way to work and in the front on the way home because that’s where his buddies sat.
Jerry Romero should have been in the train’s second car, but he wasn’t.
He decided at the last minute to drive to work that morning so he could pick up his new bicycle. He was at a Studio City bike shop when his frantic father called to find out if he was all right.
“Somebody made the statement to me about my being lucky, how I should be thankful, be happy,” said Romero, 43. “But what I’m wondering is when I’m going to feel that.”
Had he been on the train, he said, perhaps he could have helped some of the injured.
“It’s a hard feeling to get out of your mind,” he said.
Landis is unsure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke he was trapped in the wreckage with a pair of firefighters standing above him, trying to get him out.
Another passenger was shouting for help. Saws were cutting through metal somewhere else on the train.
His cell phone was ringing nonstop but he couldn’t move his arm to answer it. It was his wife who had been waiting for him at the train station with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 1 month, and who was becoming increasingly certain with each unanswered call that he would never answer.
“I thought my arm was cut off,” Landis said. “There was an arm laying across my body … and I was touching the arm. So I told the firemen my arm had been severed. But I could hear the firemen talking to each other, and they said ‘No, that’s a DB.’ A dead body.”
It had landed on top of him.
The first car had indeed been the deadliest place to be. But the impact was so severe that even people in the rear car had been killed.
“I found two bodies on a staircase in the third car, one on top of the other,” Eckstein said.
Landis was one of the first to be flown by helicopter to a hospital. He was relieved when he was finally in flight, but he worried when doctors said they wanted to put him in a medically induced coma while he recovered from serious internal injuries.
He had suffered a bruised heart, bruised lungs, broken ribs, a broken back, broken arm, fractured sternum, internal bleeding and had a wrist dislocated so badly it would need surgery.
Doctors were able to keep him conscious during his recovery. After five days in intensive care, he was transferred to a regular hospital room. He took his first steps Tuesday, but he doesn’t expect to be going home anytime soon.
When Metrolink resumed service Monday, Romero returned to the train, and he and other emotional passengers hugged and wept.
He posted a note at the Simi Valley station listing fellow riders he knows only by first name and asking them to call and tell him they’re OK.
He found himself paying more attention to anyone he has a chance encounter with, not just his train friends. He’ll pause to smile and say hi, and one day last week he picked up some Mickey Mouse stickers at work and handed them out to everyone in the second car.
“Things are starting to get back into place,” he said, striking a more upbeat tone. “I don’t know if it will ever get back in place to the full extent, but it’s gett ing there.”
Buckley had told his family that when he died he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the back of a train.
His son doubts that it’s legal to spread the ashes from the back of the train, but his family hopes to scatter them off a bridge above the tracks.
“He died truly doing something he loved,” Buckley said of his father. “But I hope he died peacefully and not in some mangled steel. That’s a hard thought to get out of my head.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) _ It was shaping up as a perfect afternoon when Kipp Landis climbed aboard the doomed Metrolink 111 train at Union Station.
Landis had managed to get away from his law office early, giving him just enough time to catch the 3:35 p.m. train to Moorpark to coach his 5-year-old son Jett’s soccer team. Along with his briefcase, he was carrying a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for his players.
Before leaving the station, train engineer Robert Sanchez, a diabetic, phoned in his dinner order to a deli just down the street from Metrolink’s Moorpark station, the last stop on his run. He told Hub Hoagies ‘N More owner Randy Richardson he’d be there about 4:30 p.m. to pick up the roast beef sandwich — no onion, no tomato, extra light mayo and Italian dressing.
Neither Sanchez nor Landis would make it to that final stop.
Sanchez would die in the cab of his locomotive after driving through a red light and head-on into a freight train, killing 24 passengers. Landis would join many of his fellow passengers at an emergency room, fighting for his life.
The tragedy of Sept. 12 would forever alter the lives of hundreds of people, from the 222 on board to those who should have been on the train but missed it, to the relatives of riders who were killed, to the veteran first-responders who labeled it the most horrific thing they’d ever seen.
For Landis, the ride home began uneventfully with him taking his usual seat in the train’s first car.
“It was a beautiful day, it was perfect,” he recalled, describing one of those idyllic, sun-splashed Southern California afternoons seen on postcards.
A Metrolink rider for nearly 13 years, he ignored warnings of friends who called the front of the train the “suicide car.” He figured he’d be safe as long as he sat with his back to the engine so that he wouldn’t pitch forward if the train hit something. It never occurred to him that the train might run head-on into an oncoming locomotive going 40 mph.
The first 45 minutes of the ride were uneventful. Landis chatted with a young woman he worried would doze off and miss her stop.
She got off at the Chatsworth station, and about two minutes later — 4:22 p.m. — the 42-year-old attorney and Moorpark planning commissioner heard a gigantic bang.
“The next thing I remember, I was telling myself to breathe,” Landis said from his hospital bed at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.
Minutes after the crash, Dr. Marc Eckstein was pulling up to his San Fernando Valley home when he heard a bulletin on the radio about a train crash.
Eckstein, medical director for the Los Angeles Fire Department, put the car’s emergency lights and siren on and raced to the scene 10 minutes away. A veteran of earthquakes, deadly fires and a 2005 Metrolink train crash that killed 11 people, Eckstein was stunned by what he saw.
“I’ve been doing emergency medicine for 25 years,” since he was a teenage paramedic in New York in the 1980s, said Eckstein, 44. “I have never seen so much carnage like this in one place in my career.”
Firefighters from nearby Station 77 could see smoke rising from the freight train’s locomotive as they arrived. It was engulfed by flames and two of its crew members were trapped inside and frantically pounding on the windshield for help.
“That was a challenge, getting through that front windshield, because it’s essentially like bulletproof glass. And they got those guys out, saved their lives,” said fire Capt. Thomas Moore, 49. He said firefighters try to focus on moments like those rather than dwell on the people they couldn’t save.
Near the fire, the Metrolink’s locomotive was embedded in the first passenger car. Eckstein could see bodies of several riders ripped to pieces and intertwined with metal debris from the train. Some were stacked on top of injured passengers.
Among the dead was Alan Buckley, 59, who may have been Metrolink’s biggest fan. He was riding from his home in Simi Valley to his job as a mechanic for the city of Burbank since 1992, the year the agency inaugurated commuter rail service.
His father had been a railroad switchman and he had been fascinated with trains since he was a child. He loved trains so much that he once sent his mother a postcard of the one he rode with the words: ‘This is the train I take back and forth to work. The greatest thing that’s ever happened to me.’”
“And that’s what ended up killing him,” said his son, Jeff Buckley, his voice choked with emotion.
Like Landis, Buckley had been seated in the front car. He rode in the back on the way to work and in the front on the way home because that’s where his buddies sat.
Jerry Romero should have been in the train’s second car, but he wasn’t.
He decided at the last minute to drive to work that morning so he could pick up his new bicycle. He was at a Studio City bike shop when his frantic father called to find out if he was all right.
“Somebody made the statement to me about my being lucky, how I should be thankful, be happy,” said Romero, 43. “But what I’m wondering is when I’m going to feel that.”
Had he been on the train, he said, perhaps he could have helped some of the injured.
“It’s a hard feeling to get out of your mind,” he said.
Landis is unsure how long he was unconscious, but when he awoke he was trapped in the wreckage with a pair of firefighters standing above him, trying to get him out.
Another passenger was shouting for help. Saws were cutting through metal somewhere else on the train.
His cell phone was ringing nonstop but he couldn’t move his arm to answer it. It was his wife who had been waiting for him at the train station with their three sons, ages 7, 5 and 1 month, and who was becoming increasingly certain with each unanswered call that he would never answer.
“I thought my arm was cut off,” Landis said. “There was an arm laying across my body … and I was touching the arm. So I told the firemen my arm had been severed. But I could hear the firemen talking to each other, and they said ‘No, that’s a DB.’ A dead body.”
It had landed on top of him.
The first car had indeed been the deadliest place to be. But the impact was so severe that even people in the rear car had been killed.
“I found two bodies on a staircase in the third car, one on top of the other,” Eckstein said.
Landis was one of the first to be flown by helicopter to a hospital. He was relieved when he was finally in flight, but he worried when doctors said they wanted to put him in a medically induced coma while he recovered from serious internal injuries.
He had suffered a bruised heart, bruised lungs, broken ribs, a broken back, broken arm, fractured sternum, internal bleeding and had a wrist dislocated so badly it would need surgery.
Doctors were able to keep him conscious during his recovery. After five days in intensive care, he was transferred to a regular hospital room. He took his first steps Tuesday, but he doesn’t expect to be going home anytime soon.
When Metrolink resumed service Monday, Romero returned to the train, and he and other emotional passengers hugged and wept.
He posted a note at the Simi Valley station listing fellow riders he knows only by first name and asking them to call and tell him they’re OK.
He found himself paying more attention to anyone he has a chance encounter with, not just his train friends. He’ll pause to smile and say hi, and one day last week he picked up some Mickey Mouse stickers at work and handed them out to everyone in the second car.
“Things are starting to get back into place,” he said, striking a more upbeat tone. “I don’t know if it will ever get back in place to the full extent, but it’s gett ing there.”
Buckley had told his family that when he died he wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered from the back of a train.
His son doubts that it’s legal to spread the ashes from the back of the train, but his family hopes to scatter them off a bridge above the tracks.
“He died truly doing something he loved,” Buckley said of his father. “But I hope he died peacefully and not in some mangled steel. That’s a hard thought to get out of my head.”
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Car collides with trailer rig in Texas, killing 5
Date: 8/8/2008 12:33 AM
GEORGE WEST, Texas (AP) _ A car collided with a tractor-trailer rig hauling fuel oil on Interstate 37 in South Texas, killing five members of an extended family, authorities said.
San Patricio County Sheriff Leroy Moody said the five victims all were in the car, which caught fire after veering into another lane and colliding with the tanker. The tanker truck did not catch fire and the driver was not injured.
Department of Public Safety Sr. Trooper Gerald Lee Bryant identified the dead as driver Cynthia Perez, 32; Robert Perez Jr., 38; Robert Perez Sr., 60; David Perez, 23; Brittany Perez, 12, all of Corpus Christi. Bryant told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times that Robert Perez Sr. and Robert Perez Jr. were father and son and that Brittany Perez was Cynthia Perez’s daughter.
The tanker was hauling a load of fuel oil from the Valero refinery in Three Rivers to the Port of Corpus Christi, about 40 miles southeast of the crash site near the small community of Swinney Switch.
The southbound lanes of I-37 remained closed late Thursday, more than nine hours after the crash.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
GEORGE WEST, Texas (AP) _ A car collided with a tractor-trailer rig hauling fuel oil on Interstate 37 in South Texas, killing five members of an extended family, authorities said.
San Patricio County Sheriff Leroy Moody said the five victims all were in the car, which caught fire after veering into another lane and colliding with the tanker. The tanker truck did not catch fire and the driver was not injured.
Department of Public Safety Sr. Trooper Gerald Lee Bryant identified the dead as driver Cynthia Perez, 32; Robert Perez Jr., 38; Robert Perez Sr., 60; David Perez, 23; Brittany Perez, 12, all of Corpus Christi. Bryant told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times that Robert Perez Sr. and Robert Perez Jr. were father and son and that Brittany Perez was Cynthia Perez’s daughter.
The tanker was hauling a load of fuel oil from the Valero refinery in Three Rivers to the Port of Corpus Christi, about 40 miles southeast of the crash site near the small community of Swinney Switch.
The southbound lanes of I-37 remained closed late Thursday, more than nine hours after the crash.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Crash of illegal charter bus in Texas kills 15
The below AP story is a perfect example of why federal transportation regulations and trial lawyers make a difference for a safe world. Not only was this accident a direct result of failure to comply with regulations, it is clear that a more diligent approach to safety, would have saved lives. In a world where our government is run by people who think government is bad, only the trial lawyers are there to force those who kill and maim, to pay the consequences.
Another irony, is that tires has become a particularly relevant topic for us and while this tire disaster isn’t quite the same as our Two Tires Done Wrong campaign, it is illustrative of how dangerous doing tires the wrong way, can be. The manufacturer’s recommendations should always be followed with tires (but don’t assume that the installer’s of your tires are doing so.) See
“>http://fishtail.tv
Attorney Gordon Johnson
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800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2008
Date: 8/9/2008 12:17 AM
By LINDA STEWART BALL and DANNY ROBBINS
Associated Press Writer
SHERMAN, Texas (AP) _ An unlicensed charter bus carrying a Vietnamese-American Catholic group on a pilgrimage to a religious festival blew an illegally treaded tire and skidded off a highway early Friday, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens, authorities said.
The bus, en route from Houston to Missouri with 55 people aboard, smashed into a guardrail and tipped over along the edge of the road at about 12:45 a.m., crushing one side of the vehicle and scattering luggage, clothes, a sandal and a blood-soaked pillow across the grass and pavement.
Ten people were taken to the hospital by helicopter, and some were in critical condition late Friday.
Passenger Leha Nguyen, 45, said passengers were dozing off when she heard a noise and screaming, and opened her eyes.
“Somebody was laying on my legs. A lady next to me, she had her arm crushed up. The lady who was on my left, a man was on top of her,” she said at a hospital. She said nobody had been wearing seat belts, and people were strewn all over. A television had fallen on one person.
“I think I’m the luckiest one out of most people,” she said.
Most of the passengers were from the Vietnamese Martyrs Church and two other mostly Vietnamese congregations in Houston. They were on their way to Carthage, Mo., for an annual open-air festival honoring the Virgin Mary.
The Marian Days pilgrimage, begun in the late 1970s, attracts thousands of Catholics of Vietnamese descent and includes a large outdoor Mass each day, entertainment and camping at night.
“Please pray for us,” said Holly Nguyen, a 38-year-old church member who was following behind the bus in a car but did not see the wreck. She anxiously awaited word of her father, who was on the bus when it ran off the road about 65 miles north of Dallas, close to the Oklahoma line.
The right front tire, which blew out, had been retreaded in violation of safety standards, said Debbie Hersman, a member of the National Transportation Safety board. The tread had separated from the tire itself in a process called delamination.
“If there is a loss of pressure or the tire becomes delaminated, it’s much more difficult to control the vehicle,” she said.
It is legal to retread such tires but not on the axle that steers the bus, Hersman said. The driver was a 52-year-old who had a commercial license but whose medical certification had expired she said.
The driver was reported in stable condition.
The bus operator, Iguala BusMex Inc. of Houston, had applied in June for a federal license to operate as a charter but was still awaiting approval, according to online records.
The company recently filed incorporation papers, listing the same owner and address as Angel Tours Inc., which was forced by federal regulators to take its vehicles out of interstate service June 23 after an unsatisfactory review, records show. Details of the review were not in the online records.
Neither entity is currently authorized to operate as a carrier in interstate commerce, said John H. Hill, administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
“We have requested law enforcement agencies to be alert for any buses being operated by Angel Tours or Iguala BusMex, since they are not authorized to operate legally,” he said in a written statement. “If found on the road, we want law enforcement to immediately stop and place the vehicles out of service.”
In a Houston building with a weathered Angel Tours plywood sign, a man declined to identify himself Friday or comment to The Associated Press about the wreck. An outgoing phone message at Angel Tours late Friday said the voicemail box was full.
The tragedy was the nation’s deadliest bus crash since 2004, when 15 people were killed in a wreck in Arkansas on their way to Mississippi’s casinos. In 2005 near Dallas, 23 people were killed when a bus carrying nursing home residents away from Hurricane Rita caught fire while in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The Rev. Joseph Vu, a priest at the Vietnamese Martyrs Church and vicar for the 30,000 to 35,000 Vietnamese Catholics in the region, was not on the trip but arrived at a relief station set up for victims’ families at a church in nearby Denison.
“I’m going to tell people we don’t blame anybody,” he said. “This happened like Katrina, like Challenger. What we can do is pray.” He added: “God will comfort them. Tell people to keep trusting in God. Do not blame anybody. Do not ask why. Now we just help each other to get through this.”
A sobbing Mary Nguyen, a member of the Vietnamese Martyrs Church for more than 10 years, learned that a close friend had died. “She was just a very good person,” she said. “The church is like one big family here. We’re very close. We stick together.”
About 900 people gathered Friday night at Vietnamese Martyrs Church for a Mass at which Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo appeared.
“We are here with them to pray for those who are lost and for God’s consolation in this time of grief and loss,” DiNardo said. “The Vietnamese Catholic culture is very strong. A lot of those who have come here have been through a great deal just to get to this country. They’ve always preserved their Catholic faith. This is a trial. This is a challenge.”
DiNardo said the losses, which included church leaders, were “incomprehensible.”
One of the victims was identified as Hoangy Thi Dung, 71, of Houston, who was pronounced dead by a Grayson County justice of the peace. Authorities had not released the identity of other victims.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Anabelle Garay in Sherman; Regina L. Burns, Jamie Stengle in Dallas; Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth; and Michael Graczyk and Monica Rhor in Houston.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.
Another irony, is that tires has become a particularly relevant topic for us and while this tire disaster isn’t quite the same as our Two Tires Done Wrong campaign, it is illustrative of how dangerous doing tires the wrong way, can be. The manufacturer’s recommendations should always be followed with tires (but don’t assume that the installer’s of your tires are doing so.) See
“>http://fishtail.tv
Attorney Gordon Johnson
http://fishtail.tv
http://subtlebraininjury.com
http://tbilaw.com
http://waiting.com
http://vestibulardisorder.com
http://youtube.com/profile?user=braininjuryattorney
g@gordonjohnson.com
800-992-9447
©Attorney Gordon S. Johnson, Jr. 2008
Date: 8/9/2008 12:17 AM
By LINDA STEWART BALL and DANNY ROBBINS
Associated Press Writer
SHERMAN, Texas (AP) _ An unlicensed charter bus carrying a Vietnamese-American Catholic group on a pilgrimage to a religious festival blew an illegally treaded tire and skidded off a highway early Friday, killing at least 15 people and injuring dozens, authorities said.
The bus, en route from Houston to Missouri with 55 people aboard, smashed into a guardrail and tipped over along the edge of the road at about 12:45 a.m., crushing one side of the vehicle and scattering luggage, clothes, a sandal and a blood-soaked pillow across the grass and pavement.
Ten people were taken to the hospital by helicopter, and some were in critical condition late Friday.
Passenger Leha Nguyen, 45, said passengers were dozing off when she heard a noise and screaming, and opened her eyes.
“Somebody was laying on my legs. A lady next to me, she had her arm crushed up. The lady who was on my left, a man was on top of her,” she said at a hospital. She said nobody had been wearing seat belts, and people were strewn all over. A television had fallen on one person.
“I think I’m the luckiest one out of most people,” she said.
Most of the passengers were from the Vietnamese Martyrs Church and two other mostly Vietnamese congregations in Houston. They were on their way to Carthage, Mo., for an annual open-air festival honoring the Virgin Mary.
The Marian Days pilgrimage, begun in the late 1970s, attracts thousands of Catholics of Vietnamese descent and includes a large outdoor Mass each day, entertainment and camping at night.
“Please pray for us,” said Holly Nguyen, a 38-year-old church member who was following behind the bus in a car but did not see the wreck. She anxiously awaited word of her father, who was on the bus when it ran off the road about 65 miles north of Dallas, close to the Oklahoma line.
The right front tire, which blew out, had been retreaded in violation of safety standards, said Debbie Hersman, a member of the National Transportation Safety board. The tread had separated from the tire itself in a process called delamination.
“If there is a loss of pressure or the tire becomes delaminated, it’s much more difficult to control the vehicle,” she said.
It is legal to retread such tires but not on the axle that steers the bus, Hersman said. The driver was a 52-year-old who had a commercial license but whose medical certification had expired she said.
The driver was reported in stable condition.
The bus operator, Iguala BusMex Inc. of Houston, had applied in June for a federal license to operate as a charter but was still awaiting approval, according to online records.
The company recently filed incorporation papers, listing the same owner and address as Angel Tours Inc., which was forced by federal regulators to take its vehicles out of interstate service June 23 after an unsatisfactory review, records show. Details of the review were not in the online records.
Neither entity is currently authorized to operate as a carrier in interstate commerce, said John H. Hill, administrator for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
“We have requested law enforcement agencies to be alert for any buses being operated by Angel Tours or Iguala BusMex, since they are not authorized to operate legally,” he said in a written statement. “If found on the road, we want law enforcement to immediately stop and place the vehicles out of service.”
In a Houston building with a weathered Angel Tours plywood sign, a man declined to identify himself Friday or comment to The Associated Press about the wreck. An outgoing phone message at Angel Tours late Friday said the voicemail box was full.
The tragedy was the nation’s deadliest bus crash since 2004, when 15 people were killed in a wreck in Arkansas on their way to Mississippi’s casinos. In 2005 near Dallas, 23 people were killed when a bus carrying nursing home residents away from Hurricane Rita caught fire while in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
The Rev. Joseph Vu, a priest at the Vietnamese Martyrs Church and vicar for the 30,000 to 35,000 Vietnamese Catholics in the region, was not on the trip but arrived at a relief station set up for victims’ families at a church in nearby Denison.
“I’m going to tell people we don’t blame anybody,” he said. “This happened like Katrina, like Challenger. What we can do is pray.” He added: “God will comfort them. Tell people to keep trusting in God. Do not blame anybody. Do not ask why. Now we just help each other to get through this.”
A sobbing Mary Nguyen, a member of the Vietnamese Martyrs Church for more than 10 years, learned that a close friend had died. “She was just a very good person,” she said. “The church is like one big family here. We’re very close. We stick together.”
About 900 people gathered Friday night at Vietnamese Martyrs Church for a Mass at which Cardinal Daniel N. DiNardo appeared.
“We are here with them to pray for those who are lost and for God’s consolation in this time of grief and loss,” DiNardo said. “The Vietnamese Catholic culture is very strong. A lot of those who have come here have been through a great deal just to get to this country. They’ve always preserved their Catholic faith. This is a trial. This is a challenge.”
DiNardo said the losses, which included church leaders, were “incomprehensible.”
One of the victims was identified as Hoangy Thi Dung, 71, of Houston, who was pronounced dead by a Grayson County justice of the peace. Authorities had not released the identity of other victims.
___
Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Anabelle Garay in Sherman; Regina L. Burns, Jamie Stengle in Dallas; Angela K. Brown in Fort Worth; and Michael Graczyk and Monica Rhor in Houston.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.