Wisconsin Personal Injury Attorneys Blog

We've written before in this space about the teenager who sustained severe injuries in a fall at a Wisconsin amusement park. There's been a very positive update to her story: The 14-year-old recently appeared at a news conference to promote an expansion at the Madison children's hospital many credit with saving her life.

After the Florida teen fell 100 feet from a Wisconsin Dells amusement park ride, she sustained spine and brain injuries that left her parents and doctors wondering whether she could survive.

In a previous post, we discussed how federal safety officials wanted to require electronic on-board recorders to be installed on trucks. This was to address the concern that truck drivers were fatigued behind the wheel, increasing the risk of causing a truck accident. The trucking industry challenged the requirement.

Now the trucking industry is challenging yet another rule that addresses truck driver fatigue. Citing an improper focus and failure to meet legal standards, the trucking industry is challenging a rule that requires truck drivers to rest for a period of 34 hours each week.

Accidents are unexpected and can happen in the blink of an eye. Those involved are often permanently affected, whether it is physically, emotionally or financially. But the situation can be even more frustrating if the accident was the result of someone else's negligence, carelessness or recklessness.

It is no surprise that victims of accidents may suffer any number of physical injuries. One type of injury that can impact an individual in many ways is a brain injury. But just how much impact can head trauma have on someone, especially if that someone is a child?

Two bad decisions made by an 18-year-old Wisconsin woman had her arrested for suspicion of drunk driving.

At 2:29 a.m. Monday, the woman received an underage drinking citation, but still chose to get into her car and drive. She ended up crossing the center line, striking another vehicle, swerving back into her lane and then finally stopping when she crashed into a stop sign. She was taken to the hospital by helicopter, but was released the next day. The other driver's car went into a ditch and struck a tree, but he was not seriously injured.

"I served 14 months in Vietnam and came home without a scratch," a 63-year-old Wisconsin roofing contractor recently told a newspaper. "And then this happened."

He was going to a church about 90 miles east of La Crosse that Sunday morning 21 years ago. He knew he had plenty of time to get there that morning to serve as an usher, so he decided to take a jog around his Nekoosa neighborhood. Unfortunately, a Sunday drunk driver was on the same road at the same time and slammed her car into him.

In that car accident, he suffered a serious brain injury, requiring six and a half hours of surgery.

She cried her eyes out at the hearing, according to media reports. The 19-year-old Wisconsin woman was apologetic and contrite as she pleaded emotionally to the court for mercy.

But the court weighed a number of factors, including the mercy the young woman had shown the good Samaritans she'd struck with her car in a pedestrian accident last winter.

Last week, we wrote in this space about the horrific series of car and truck accidents on an interstate highway far from us here in La Crosse.

That Florida tragedy is still being talked about by folks down there and across the nation. The Washington Post recently ran a brief article reminding people of other terrible crashes over the past 25 years on our nation's highways.

A La Crosse TV station is running a report on lingering questions about the deadly chain of car and truck accidents on a smoke- and fog-choked Florida interstate highway this past weekend.

State troopers there shut down the highway around midnight Saturday following a crash involving a pair of SUVs. After three hours, the highway was reopened; minutes later the series of crashes involving at least six tractor-trailers, a dozen cars and a motorhome began.

When truck drivers get too tired, they tend to get into more accidents than if they are properly rested. That's why for many years, federal safety regulators have tried to tighten the rules on allowable hours of service. The goal, quite simply, is to prevent a truck accident from occurring because of driver fatigue.

Regulators have recently tweaked the hours-of-service rules. But to really enforce the rules, federal safety officials believe it is important to require trucks to have electronic on-board recorders to document how many hours truckers are actually driving.