Accident Safety & Reconstruction: May 2009 Archives

Litigation is on the increase and is affecting people’s behavior in all walks of the ski world.  In the latest case a 17-year old boy, Brian Martin, fell off a ski rail in Whiteface Mountain, NY, and broke his tibia on a support bar. His lawyer, Salvatore D. Ferlazzo, argued that the rail was not skirted and the bar should have been covered or cushioned.  He produced video evidence and a skiing expert to support his thesis.

However the court considered all he facts and concluded that the state’s obligation to Martin was to make the conditions of performing an inherently risky maneuver like rail sliding “as safe as they appear to be, not as safe as it could be.”  In other words the person executing the maneuver had to take some responsibility for their actions, make their own decision about how they would behave and accept some of the consequences.

Excerpted from PlanetSKI.com.

Accident reconstruction experts in the manslaughter trial of Ryan Hurd, 23, were asked to determine who was driving a car that was traveling at nearly 100 mph at the time of a 2007 crash.  The speeding car flipped, crashed and burned, killing one occupant and injuring two others south of New Vineyard, ME.  MorningSentinel.com reports:

Richard Hartley, the attorney defending Ryan Hurd, 23, of Lincoln, contends his client was in the front passenger seat and that the man who died, Terry Richardson Jr., 34, of Dover-Foxcroft, was driving Hurd's car at the time of the accident...  Prosecution expert Wade Bartlett said the passenger could not have been thrown out of the driver's side window because he would have been unable to bypass the driver and the steering column before the vehicle flipped over.