White Plains New York Personal Injury Law Blog

It's the twenty-first century and most of us turn to social media to report the happenings in our lives. There are events that you want to share with family and friends - promotions, movie and restaurant reviews, family news. But if you are involved in a car accident or any other type of injury, stay away from social media.

In a recent Manhattan construction accident, a 51-year old worker was killed while suspended on a scaffold 7 stories from the ground. While working on the 14-story Upper East Side residential building, a heavy stone slab known as a coping stone was dislodged above him. The stone hit the worker on the head and, although he was rescued from the scaffold by firefighters, he later died at a hospital.

Coping stones are flat stones that cap a wall. The workers were part of a project to repair the building's exterior façade. The building itself was damaged in 2008 when a crane collapsed at the construction site next door. That accident killed 6 construction workers and one other individual.

At this time, it is unknown whether the deceased worker had been wearing a harness or a hard hat. A second worker who had been on the scaffold with the victim was unharmed.

36 people were hospitalized as a result of a recent accident where a Viking cruise ship lost engine power in stormy weather. The cruise accident occurred off the coast of Norway and became what passengers called a chaotic 48-hour nightmare.

During a 12-day cruise of Norwegian towns, the Viking Sky's four engines lost power and the ship began to list. At the time, the local weather reported wind gusts up to 43 mph and waves more than 26 feet tall.

The circumstances are eerily similar. A new Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 jet crashed into the Java Sea in Indonesia last October, killing all 189 people on board. And earlier this month, a new Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed near Addis Ababa in Ethiopia with 157 people aboard. There were no survivors.

Both planes ran into trouble just after take-off as the pilots struggled to maintain control of the aircraft. Review of the black box data from the Indonesia crash revealed that an automatic safety system forced the 737's nose down. The preliminary result of that investigation determined that a faulty sensor caused the plane's software to believe that the aircraft was stalling and therefore compensated by pointing the nose down. There had been prior reports of sensor problems on the same aircraft. A final investigation report is due later this year.