Articles Posted in Legal

Published on:

By

Last week, a small fire at a high-rise hotel in the main tourist district of Bangkok, Thailand caused the upper floors to become filled with smoke, killing at least one foreign tourist and injuring 23 others.

When firefighters arrived at the 15-story Grand Park Avenue Bangkok hotel last Thursday evening, they saw people screaming for help from the upper floors. The smoke had risen so quickly and had gotten so thick that “people were panicked and some of them wanted to jump from windows. We had to tell them to wait and we sent cranes in to help,” said a local fire chief.

One foreign woman who suffered from smoke inhalation was unconscious when taken from the building and later died at a Bangkok hospital. It can take just two or three breaths of smoky air that contains carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide to cause permanent injury to the brain, heart and lungs, and even death.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Several weeks back, a few unattended candles sparked a fire that caused about $130,000 in damage and caused more than 40 people to be evacuated from an apartment building in Seattle, Washington.

The fire started at just before 4 a.m., according to the Seattle Fire Department. Firefighters responding to the scene had to use a ladder to rescue a woman who had already become trapped in her second floor unit. Once she was rescued, it took them another 30 minutes to knock down the fire.

The evacuated residents waited inside a city bus as the firefighters fought the blaze. By about 6 a.m., all but two of them were able to return to their homes. Those two residents, a man and a woman, were being helped by American Red Cross.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

In mid-February, the following product safety recall was voluntarily conducted by Bosch Security Systems of Fairport, NY, in cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Consumers should stop using this product immediately unless otherwise instructed. It is illegal to attempt to resell a recalled consumer product.

The name of the Bosch product is the Fire Alarm Control Panel. The fire alarm panel is a locking red wall box with dimensions of 22.7 inches high by 14.5 inches wide by 4.3 inches deep. The status, date and time can be seen through a glass screen on the panel door. The word BOSCH is printed on the right corner of the panel and the model number FPA-1000-UL is printed on the bottom left below the glass screen. The alarm panels featured software versions 1.10, 1.11 and 1.12, which can be determined by installers. These units were designed to be used in small to medium-sized facilities, in both public and residential buildings. These were sold at authorized distributors and installers nationwide from May 2009 through October 2011. They were manufactured in China.

About 330 units are being recalled because when the “alarm verification” feature of the system is turned on, the control panel could fail to sound an alarm if a fire occurs. In addition, on systems with 50 or more reporting stations, a delay in sounding an alarm and reporting a fire might occur if the loop for the alarm system is broken.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

In late February, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with Carlisle FoodService, announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer products. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately. Also, it is illegal to attempt to resell a recalled consumer product.

The type of product being recalled is beverage cups and mugs. About 111,000 units are targeted by the recall. The importer of these cups and mugs is Carlisle FoodService Products of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

The danger related to these cups and mugs is that they can break when they come in contact with hot liquids, posing a threat of serious burns to consumers. Carlisle has received three reports of cups and mugs breaking during use with hot liquid. No injuries were reported, however.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Here is a story that shows clearly why, if a fire breaks out in your home, you should get out immediately and call 911 to report the fire, rather than stay inside and try to extinguish the fire yourself. In short: Unforeseen dangers can arise, and they can kill you.

In mid-February in San Francisco, investigators who reviewed last year’s house fire in the Diamond Heights district that killed two city firefighters issued a set of safety recommendations aimed at preventing a similar tragedy in the future.

A sudden flare-up in the burning house, fueled by oxygen coming in from a broken window, caused the deaths of the two firefighters. The men died even though they did not commit any procedural errors, San Francisco fire officials said.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Rather than creating traditional landfills, U.S. military personnel have burned tons of trash and human waste while stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. But some veterans now believe that their present health problems are the result of breathing in the polluted fumes and smoke that came from those burn pits.

Legislation filed in November in the U.S. Congress would direct the Department of Veterans Affairs to create a registry for veterans who might have been exposed to these burn pits during the wars involving the U.S. between 2001 and 2011. The database would allow the government to collect information on the number of veterans exposed to the burn pits and the types of health problems they are suffering. However, it doesn’t direct the government to provide any particular type of benefits to those veterans.

“Is there a really consistent pattern of a problem, of is it more a coincidence?” said one member of Congress. “We’ve seen anecdotally what appears to be some pretty weird symptoms that just turned up from nowhere” among soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

In late January in a small town in Illinois, a mother and father helped to minimize the injury to their nine-year-old daughter from a burn accident, by knowing what to do and acting quickly.

What would you do if your child got scalded by boiling hot water, or if you saw a restaurant worker scalded by hot liquid or food? Doctors say this is something that parents and restaurants employees alike should know, because these scalding accidents happens a lot.

The young girl in this case did sustain second degree burns and third degree burns, and was still in considerable plain a few weeks after the burn accident. But without her parents’ fast actions, the girl probably would have had much worse injuries–which could have required skin graft surgery to repair damaged skin.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

Some Toyota Camry and RAV4 owners have reported their car doors catching on fire, apparently from a power window switch. Federal safety regulators are investigating reports of fires in the driver’s side doors of 2007 Toyota Camry sedans and RAV4 crossover SUVs.

The probe could affect as many as 830,000 vehicles, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said last week in documents posted on its website. The vehicles have not been recalled.

The fires appear to start in the power window switch in the door. Six fires have been reported to the agency, but NHTSA has no reports of anyone being hurt. The agency said it started the investigation this week.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

In Knoxville, Tennessee last week, a fire in the middle of the night from a fireplace that was not properly monitored cause severe burns to a 23-year-old man. Apparently, the man tried to put out the spreading flames by stomping on the burning materials and by placing towels over the flames to smother them. As a result, the victim suffered second degree burns and third degree burns to his hands and feet. He was flown to the Vanderbilt Burn Center in Nashville for more advanced treatment. The victim might need a skin graft to fully heal his burn wounds.

A neighbor said that the man, who was alone in the house at the time of the fire, was using the fireplace to stay warm. “When fire crews got to the house, the victim was outside already,” said the local fire chief. “He had apparently made an attempt to put the flames out before they got out of control. That’s usually when you suffer burns to your hands and feet.”

Firefighters attended to the victim, and started a defensive attack to keep the fire from spreading to houses next door. But the fire became so intense that a neighbor’s home, including the roof and siding, was damaged by the heat. In addition to the victim’s house being destroyed, there is now the possibility that the burn victim has legal liability for damages inflicted upon the adjacent house.

Continue reading →
Published on:

By

In late January, ten people were treated and released from the hospital after suffering smoke inhalation from a fire that broke out inside the Joe Gibbs Racing complex in Huntersville, N.C.

Huntersville police said that a machine, thought to be a laser cutter, caught fire inside the building. The fire was contained to the machine shop inside the building, and the 10 people were treated by paramedics in the adjacent parking lot. These ten people were then cleared to go back inside the complex.

“A piece of equipment in the machine shop caught fire at our Joe Gibbs Racing headquarters in Huntersville, N.C. The fire department was called and the fire was quickly contained and extinguished,” read a statement from Joe Gibbs Racing. “A few of our employees received treatment on site for issues related to smoke inhalation. All employees were able to return to work within the hour to continue preparations for the 2012 NASCAR season.”

Continue reading →
Contact Information
New York, NY
15 Maiden Ln #1400
New York, NY 10038
(212) ANSWERS
(212) 267-9377
info@212answers.com
Mineola, NY
25 Roslyn Rd 2nd Floor
Mineola, NY 11501
(516) PIATTYS
(516) 742-8897
info@212answers.com
ATTORNEY ADVERTISING

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Please do not include any confidential or sensitive information in a contact form, text message, or voicemail. The contact form sends information by non-encrypted email, which is not secure. Submitting a contact form, sending a text message, making a phone call, or leaving a voicemail does not create an attorney-client relationship.

Copyright © 2015 – 2024, Kramer & Pollack
JUSTIA Law Firm Blog Design