Last Tuesday, 6-year-old boy from Duplin County was killed in a horrific North Carolina car accident on NC-111 in Chinquapin. The AP reports that the fatal North Carolina car accident occurred around 4 PM. According to the news report: “authorities’ said the boy was riding beside his older brother, who was driving a four-wheeler…the boy apparently didn’t see the oncoming vehicle and pulled out into the road.”http://www.northcarolinainjurylawyerblog.com/cgi-bin/mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=entry&id=119145&blog_id=423

According to a local station, WITN, the 6-year-old, who attended Chinquapin Elementary School, was hit by the secretary of his school.

This horrendous tragedy strikes an emotional chord in anyone who has cared for young children. In many ways, this is every parent’s worst fear come true, and we can only hope that the family of the boy receives compassion, empathetic attention, and good healing.

Can the North Carolina car accident prevention community draw any lessons from this sad case?

Without probing into the details of what happened, it’s difficult to extrapolate. However, the report does highlight, once again, how tragedies can happen even under close adult scrutiny. Young children are constantly testing the limits of their physical environment, and they may not be fully aware of the risks inherent in their activities until too late.

While caretakers can (and probably should) do more to monitor children’s behavior and erect safe, protective areas for kids to play (without serious consequences), there are only so many strategies and tactics you can deploy to protect yourself against the chaos of life.

All that said, if you or someone your care about has been hurt in a North Carolina car accident, you may be able to avail yourself of powerful resources to get compensation for injuries, medical care, and more. A respectable and experienced North Carolina car crash law firm can help you understand your rights and what to do next.

More Web Resources:

6-year-old boy dies in a go-kart crash

Go-kart tragedy in Chinquapin

The pundits, politicians, bloggers, and soothsayers who study the problem of North Carolina truck accidents – and who mull over policy solutions to prevent horrific crashes or at least make accidents slightly less horrific – rarely explore “out of the box” initiatives. That’s understandable. Our policymakers like to ground their ideas in good science and research.

However, from time to time, it may help to consider counterintuitive solutions. Here is one of those: What if we improved technology to reduce the load burden on trucks, thereby reducing the volume of trucks on our state’s roads?

With fewer trucks on the roads, there would be fewer truck accidents.

Let’s walk through the logic a little more carefully. Thanks to information-sharing technologies, social networking, and other web- and mobile-assisted mechanisms, people in North Carolina can now access goods and services virtually. Thus, in some areas of our lives, we depend less on real “brick and mortar” supplies to help us and more on virtual solutions. For instance, instead of buying an alarm clock, you can just buy an alarm clock app on your phone. This reduces (in a small way) the amount of materials that need to be shipped, purchased, wrapped, etc.

Think about this more broadly: Imagine what might happen if we found solutions that allowed us to “outsource” many of the tasks that we now delegate to real objects. Obviously, you can’t “download” a chair to sit on. But you can download books and magazines, and you can also download systems and structures. It might take some creativity to figure out “virtual solutions” to problems like “how do I cook my dinner?” and “how do I build my porch addition?” And virtual solutions will only reduce our needs for real goods – they won’t replace them all together, unless we end up, in the distant future, living in some dystopian world, like out of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Until then, however, we can start to think creatively about how to reduce our shipping footprint and reduce the need to ship so much stuff. If we did that, we could reduce the number of trucks on the road and thus cut down on the number of serious North Carolina truck accidents.

Need more help? Connect with an experienced North Carolina truck accident law firm.

More web resources:

Why “Going Virtual” Equals “Going Green”

How More and More of Our Lives Are Becoming Virtual

You or a family member recently got into a car accident in North Carolina. Whether it was a devastating crash that resulted in serious injuries or even fatalities, or it was just a bit more than a simple fender-bender, your mind has been furiously “reconstructing” what happened and trying to figure out what went wrong and who should be to blame.

Obsessive fretting after the fact is normal for North Carolina car accident survivors – and for victims of any traumatic circumstances. The brain does not like uncertainty and incomplete pictures. It strives to fill in the details, even if those details are inaccessible, poorly rendered, or based on lapsed or biased judgments.

This can be a big problem because the law likes to deal with absolutes and objective facts – so-called “evidence.”

If you believe that your accident happened because of XYZ, and XYZ turns out to be colored by your imagination, biases, personal speculation, or bad evidence – even partially so –the defense could highlight your logical errors or lapses in judgment. Your case could suffer, and you could wind up being unable to collect much-needed compensation for your medical bills, lost work time, damage to your vehicle, and so on.

For instance, if you recall seeing a blue Honda Civic drive away after a hit and run, and the defendant actually owns an orange Honda Civic, your lapsed or “colored” memory gives an otherwise clearly guilty suspect room for legal maneuvers.

Victims misremember not only small details about their accident but also big details – such as who cut off whom, how much time the accident took, what the weather conditions were, and on and on.

Also, our lapses and misremembrances tend to get more colorful and blurry as time goes on.

For all those reasons and more, you should connect with an experienced North Carolina car accident law firm immediately to get assistance with building your case and making it as bulletproof as possible.

More web resources:

Accident victim’s memory problems

How the brain colors past events

Statistical analyses of North Carolina car accidents probably don’t paint the best picture.

Sure, institutions like the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) aggregate accident reports and statistics to give us clear directions about things to do (buckle our seatbelts, e.g.) and things to avoid (drive under the influence, text while merging onto a busy road, e.g.). But our intuition tells us that the picture should be far more complex. In other words, some factors that cause or contribute to North Carolina car accidents are probably not caught by the “dragnet” of statistical analyses – these elusive factors are important but cannot be pinpointed by research.

Here is an analogy. In physics, only about four percent of all the matter in the observable universe is baryonic matter – the stuff that makes up the stars and us. The rest of the matter/energy is contained in stuff that we can’t perceive, even with our most adept scientific tools: dark energy and dark matter.

And, in much the same way, probably the deepest, most important causes of North Carolina car accidents are “below the surface.”

Perhaps one of the most important of these factors is jerky drivers. Not jerky as in “herky jerky” but rather jerky as in “boy, that driver was a total jerk!” jerky.

Jerky drivers are different from careless, negligent, reckless drivers. A reckless driver may zoom through a red light, cut you off in traffic, or tailgate you to the point that you feel a self-destructive urge to slam on your brakes to just send a message. (Obviously, don’t do that.)

Here are some examples of what “jerky” drivers do.

• Change lanes without using turn signals;

• Play thumpity thumpity thump music loud enough and with enough bass to shake their car as well as your car and several cars around you;

• Allow their cars to degrade until they are dilapidated, so you get the feeling the windows and doors may fall off the car at literally any moment;

• Generally act aggressively without breaking any laws or venturing over into negligence/careless territory;

• Do annoying things, such as flash their lights at you or flash hand signals at you as a way of conveying frustration or anger;

• Beep at you and other people without due cause.

Comedian Louis C.K. has a wonderful bit about the perils of jerky drivers. In the bit, Louis talks about a traffic jam he was in, where cars were backed up for like a mile. The driver behind him honked specifically at Louis (as if the jam was his fault) and yelled, “Move!” The driver got so mad at Louis that he got out of his car, walked up to Louis’s car, banged on the window, and demanded that Louis move. To move would have required Louis to perform a miracle of Moses-like proportions, splitting the traffic so he could drive forward.

Although Louis’ nemesis technically didn’t do anything illegal, he acted in a jerky way, transforming an already stressful situation (traffic jam!) into something much worse and possibly more dangerous.

For help with a specific auto accident problem, connect with an experienced North Carolina car accident law firm.

More web resources:

Funny Louis C.K. YouTube clip

Catalog of other “jerky” drivers

Last Saturday, after Hurricane Irene blew through Goldsborough and took out several traffic lights, a teen died in a horrific North Carolina car crash. According to Police Captain Chad Calloway, “The wreck likely would not have happened if the traffic signals were working.” The young girl died around 4 PM. Her death was the second that North Carolina officials pinned directly on Hurricane Irene. On early Saturday, a tree limb fell on a man in Nash County and killed him. A Washington Post article several days later said that all together six North Carolinians died during Hurricane Irene’s assault. Among those killed:

• Katherine Cruz, the 15-year-old who died in the traffic light accident;
• Sixty-year-old Ricky Webb, the man killed by the tree limb;
• Fifty-year-old Tim Avery, who was killed when a tree fell on to his home;
• Jose Corona, who died in a separate traffic accident;
• Sabrina Jones, who died when a tree fell on her car;
• Melton Robinson, Jr., who was found in the Cape Fear River.

Tragic North Carolina car accidents occur even during normal, sunny weather. Victims and their family members are often left shell-shocked and flatfooted by the sudden and terrible news.

Unfortunately, the longer a victim (or family member of a victim) waits to take action, the more difficult it might be to achieve a good outcome in the legal system, including just compensation. Evidence from a crash – especially a crash that occurs during stormy weather – can be washed away or cleared off the road by maintenance crews. To that end, you should consider speaking with an attorney at an experienced North Carolina car accident law firm to go over what you should (and should not) do to protect your rights, ensure justice, and return your family to a sense of normalcy and stability.

More Web Resources:

Katherine Cruz accident

Irene and North Carolina

In a recent post on the relevance of evolution to theory about North Carolina car accidents (what can and cannot be done to solve our country and state’s motor vehicle accident problem), we touched on the idea that the root cause of vehicle crashes may be completely insoluble.

Basically, our brains evolved in Paleolithic times to deal with Paleolithic conditions. One might speculate about how our Paleolithic ancestors lived. But chances are they did not spend a significant percentage of their day riding across concrete landscapes at speeds approaching and exceeding 70 miles per hour. Even the occasional Grok who managed to hitch a ride on the back of a cheetah probably did not last long enough to take such a joyride more than once or twice.

So we face a dilemma, as people who want to end the problem of North Carolina car accidents. How can we engineer cars, roads, driver behavior, etc., to minimize risks, given that we have this fundamental constraint?

Obviously, this blog cannot hope to solve the problem in one fell swoop. But if you need help with a specific car accident question (for instance, if a drunk and driver hit you, or if a truck drove you off the road into a ditch and now you are injured and sick), a North Carolina car accident law firm can help you to deal with your specific legal, logistical, and other concerns.

Beyond that, maybe we can start a dialogue about more constructive ways to think about road safety. Because once we accept this fundamental “caveman constraint” on road safety engineering, we can contextualize engineering features that have already worked or might work. For instance, let’s think about reaction time. Paleolithic people in no way and shape or form had to confront super-fast decision making – like swerving at the last minute to avoid a truck travelling 80 miles per hour.

But we did evolve sensitive mechanisms to help us during normal flight and fight responses. For instance, when our Grok ancestors engaged in battle with saber-toothed tigers, they needed to respond rapidly to stressful conditions during the hunt, so we have evolved sensitive mechanisms that can help us react at the last second. The question is: How do we tap into those natural, spring-like mechanisms to react to a predator and apply them to engineer safer cars, better roads, smarter drivers, better signage, etc.?

We’ll leave the specifics to engineers. But just thinking in terms of this paradigm – the caveman driver paradigm – should allow us some new and cool insights that could lead to better engineering solutions.

More Web Resources:

Who is Grok?

What Did Grok Eat?