By Randy Appleton, Railroad Injury Lawyer in Virginia 

In his latest post to our law firm’s Norfolk Injuryboard blog site, my colleague Rick Shapiro decries a rollback of federal rules requiring rail corporations to install essential train-slowing and -stopping technology. The railroads, despite booking record profits, convinced regulators that protecting rail employees would be too expensive. To read more, click over to “Easing of Positive Train Control Requirement Endangers Railroad Workers.”

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Randy Appleton, Railroad Whistleblower Lawyer in Virginia

In his latest blog post to our Virginia personal injury attorney’s website, my colleague Rick Shapiro reports on a landmark whistleblower case in the railroad injury. For firing a worker specifically for filing a Federal Railroad Safety Act complaint with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, CSX must pay punitive damages for inflicting emotional distress. To read more, click over to “Record Emotional Distress Punitive Damages Award for Wrongfully Terminated CSX Dispatcher.”

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Rick Shapiro, Railroad Employee Wrongful Death Attorney

A yearlong investigation into a fatal rear-end collision on tracks near Red Oak, Iowa (IA), that left two Burlington Northern Santa Fe train crew members dead led the National Transportation Safety Board to conclude that proper scheduling and technology could have prevented the crash or significantly lessened its severity.

View a larger map of where a fatal BNSF train collision occurred near Red Oak,IA.

NTSB Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman announced the findings on April 24, 2012. Her agency’s main conclusion was that the collision between the BNSF train and a stopped track maintenance vehicle occurred because the engineer and conductor crewing the moving train had fallen asleep. The two men began their shift at 2:13 am, and the accident happened around 6:00 am. Both had been working on-call schedules and had gone several days without getting adequate sleep.

Hersman went on to note that the rail employees’ fatigue would most likely have not led directly to a fatal crash if their locomotive and rail cars were equipped with positive train control systems. PTC could have automatically slowed the train, reducing the force of the impact, or stopped it altogether.

The NTSB chair also said that that the BNSF accident highlighted the need for rail equipment manufacturers to improve the crashworthiness of modular crew cabs. She promised her agency would be working on those.

In a press release, Hersman said, “Human nature – and our need for sleep – must be respected; it must be addressed. …  Humans are fallible and make mistakes and operational accidents can be prevented with positive train control.”

As a railroad worker injury and wrongful death attorney based in Virginia (VA), I know that PTC has supposed to be coming for all major railroads for some time. I also know that rail corporations — including Amtrak, BNSF, CSX and Norfolk Southern — have been pushing regulators to move back deadlines for PTC implementation. The billion-dollar corporations say installing the safety systems will cost too much. To me, this means the railroads place less value on the health and lives of their employees than required, or even approaching fair in light of the record profits companies like BNSf, CSX and NS have been making for years.

Failing the quick adoption of PTC, I hope BNSF and all other rail operators will at least look at staffing levels and scheduling practices, then make the appropriate adjustments to limit worker fatigue.

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Rick Shapiro, Railroad Worker Injury Attorney

An injured railroad worker or retired rail worker struggling with a life-threatening cancer diagnosis who wants to file a FELA claim against their employer has a myriad of options for legal counsel. Some lawyers even head to the airwaves and proclaim their expertise in handling railroad mesothelioma claims due to exposure to asbestos. However, you should not base your decision for counsel on slick advertisements. Here are three tips for finding the best FELA lawyer to handle your case:

1. Look at the FELA attorney’s case results page on their web site.

A lawyer can talk all they want about being the best railroad injury lawyer, but they cannot hide the truth on the case results page of their web site. Why? Because this is the most heavily regulated page on any lawyer or law firm’s site. If a lawyer posts a misleading or inaccurate case result, they could potentially be disbarred or sanctioned by their state bar association. When you’re on this page, check to see what types of case results they’ve achieved in representing injured railroad workers. Have they represented injured conductors or engineers in the on-the-job injury case? Have they handled a diesel exhaust cancer case? For an example of  relevant case results, take  a look at our FELA firm’s railroad client case results. For example, in one of our cases, our firm represented a conductor who suffered paralyzing injuries when an engine hit him while he was inspecting his own train in a rail yard. We secured a multimillion dollar settlement to ensure he was properly compensated for this traumatic, life-changing event.

2. Review the FELA attorney’s accolades and accomplishments. 

If you’re looking for the best railroad worker injury lawyer, you should look for a lawyer who is recognized as a “Best Lawyer” by U.S. News & World Report and has an “AV” rating by Martindale-Hubbell. These are non-biased organizations that objectively rank the quality and caliber of attorneys across the country. Furthermore, I was an officer and Chair of the Railroad section of the American Association of Justice.

In addition to the non-biased organizational accolades, you should review the attorney’s client testimonials. If a lawyer doesn’t have many, or any, testimonials then it could be an indicator of inexperience or a lack of quality representation. To give you an idea of the type of testimonials you should be looking for, take a look at this testimonial from a mesothelioma client.

3. Check if the FELA lawyer has written any substantive publications in railroad injury law.  

In addition to actually handling these types of complex cases and being accomplished, your FELA lawyer should have some level of expertise in this field of law. This is why you should check to see if the lawyer has written any legal articles of substance in railroad law. For example, I was a co-author of the “Railroad Health & Safety- A Litigator’s Guide,” one of leading treatises on railroad injury law, found in the nation’s law libraries (72 Am. Jur. Trials 1).

For any injured railroad worker – whether you were hurt on the job working for Amtrak, Norfolk Southern, CSX, Conrail, etc. – if you follow these three tips, you’ll improve your chances of hiring a top-notch, qualified railroad injury attorney to handle your case.

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Rick Shapiro, Railroad Injury Attorney

Federal laws ranging from the Americans With Disabilities Act to the Pregnancy Discrimination Act make it illegal for any business in any industry to use may kinds of information in workers’ private medical files to make hiring, promotion and firing decisions. As corollaries to those rules, employers cannot compel employees to disclose any information about illnesses, injuries, health conditions, doctor visits or ongoing therapies when those situations are not related to workers’ job performance.

Freight railroad giant BNSF Railway intentionally violated all its employees’ federal medical privacy protections when, starting January 1, 2012, the railroad required engineers, conductors, trackmen, rail yard workers and office personnel to share every piece of health information with immediate supervisors. In a discrimination complaint filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen noted that BNSF’s policy on medical disclosure extended to ”medical conditions and/or events that occur or are diagnosed while they are away from work … even if there is no reasonable basis for believing the condition or event has any impact on the employee’s ability to perform his/her job, and even when the employee’s own doctor has placed no limitations on the employee’s job activities.”

The United Transportation Union, along with eight other groups representing rail workers across the United States, also petitioned the EEOC to compel BNSF to rescind the medical reporting policy. The organizations argued that requiring employees to “share doctor’s notes, diagnostic test results and hospital discharge summaries” could serve no other purpose than providing the rail corporation non-job-related health information it could use to make employment decisions.

BNSF announced that it was rescinding the policy — officially listed a Rule 26.3.1 in its employee handbook – in early April. A company spokeswoman told the Lincoln (NE) Journal Star that BNSF wanted only to protect other workers and the public from employees whose health problems might make them unsafe. In that same article, though, a different railroad representative was quoted as confirming to Progressive Railroading that BNSF wanted the private medical records for “expeditious, confidential handling of fitness-for-duty reviews.”

Again: Numerous federal laws explicitly prohibit the use of large categories of medical information for making employment decisions. BNSF was definitely violating workers’ privacy when issuing and enforcing Rule 26.3.1. It attempted to justify the illegal and discriminatory policy by claiming employees had in the past put other people at risk for injury or death because they had health problems they had not disclosed to the company. Such a claim asserted without specific evidence cannot be taken on faith; at the same time, the company’s defense for flouting health privacy laws absolutely convinces everyone that the company’s executives do not trust employees to be honest or value others’ safety.

As a personal injury attorney who regularly helps railroad workers who develop occupational illnesses and get injured on the job. I also strongly suspect that BNSF wanted access to employees’ complete medical records so it could use the information to claim that any work-related injury or disease was caused by a “preexisting condition.” I already know railroads will use just about any defense to avoid liability, so having all of a hurt or sick worker’s medical records would almost certainly be a temptation BNSF could not resist.

I am equally convinced that if BNSF’s Rule 26.3.1 had withstood union objections and EEOC review, Amtrak, CSX, Norfolk Southern and every other rail corporation would soon require their workers to share every piece of health information. That won’t happen for now, but the railroads must be watched closely for their next effort to violate employees’ health privacy rights.

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Randy Appleton, Injured Rail Worker’s Lawyer

In his latest blog post to our Virginia (VA) personal injury attorneys’ website, my colleague Rick Shapiro reports on a major whistleblower lawsuit victory for a Metro-North commuter railroad worker who was fired after he reported an on-the-job injury. A jury in Connecticut (CT) awarded the trackman $1 million in damages, determining that the rail corporation had violated the man’s employment rights under the Federal Railroad Safety Act of 2007, or FRSA. To read more, click over to “Jury Awards $1M to Wrongfully Terminated Rail Employee.”

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Rick Shapiro, Injured Rail Employee Attorney

After an Amtrak train collided with a tractor-trailer sitting across tracks near Alpaugh, Calfiornia (CA), the engineer controlling the locomotive went to a hospital for treatment of a back injury. Two passengers also sustained minor injuries and were treated at the scene.

According to KNSF-TV ABC30, the truck’s driver did not see or hear the train approaching as he stopped his big rig at a stop sign near a grade crossing. The trucker also failed to notice a gate lowering across his flatbed trailer, which was still in the train’s path. The engineer tried to slow and sounded his horn to no avail.

While I primarily represent railroad employees who suffer on-the-job injuries in Virginia (VA), North Carolina (NC) and Florida (FL), this train-truck collision caught my attention because of the incident’s similarity to a case my firm handled in 2005. Our client was a CSX conductor trainee who sustained a severe spinal injury when a truck caused a crash on rail yard tracks. She had to abandon her rail career, and we were able to help her recover $650,000 in damages.

Whenever accidents involving large commercial trucks and locomotives occur, injuries or fatalities are practically inevitable. I wish the Amtrak engineer a full and speedy recovery. I also hope the California accident remind all drivers of the dangers they, rail workers and passengers face at crossings.

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Rick Shapiro, Railroad Cancer Victims’ Attorney

When writing recently about a long-term study that revealed a strong link between on-the-job exposure to diesel exhaust and lung cancer deaths, I mentioned that the data had been suppressed for more than 15 years. I didn’t go into the details of the efforts to keep the truth from workers and general public because I felt it was most important to highlight the researchers conclusion that

if the diesel exhaust/lung cancer relation is causal, the public health burden of the carcinogenicity of inhaled diesel exhaust in workers and in populations of urban areas with high levels of diesel exposure may be substantial.

In short, I wanted to call attention to the reality that railroad employees, truck drivers and people living near rail yards, ports and truck depots face significant risks to their health and lives from breathing in diesel fumes.

But I’d be derelict in my duty as a Virginia (VA) personal injury attorney who has represented dozens of rail workers sickened by exposure to toxic and cancer-causing chemicals on the job if I left the details of how companies and politicians did everything they could to squelch the diesel-cancer link findings. The story closely parallels how the dangers of asbestos — and the toll of mesothelioma and asbestosis — were intentionally denied and concealed for decades, And like the shameful asbestos legacy, attempts to cover up diesel exhaust risks have resulted in thousands, if not millions, of unnecessary illnesses and deaths.

For related info about diesel exhaust fumes, take a look at these articles:

• What Every Rail Worker Needs to Know About Exposure to Diesel Exhaust Fumes and Lung Cancer
• Study Shows Link to Diesel Exhaust Fume Exposure and Increased Risk of Cancer
• Virginia FELA Attorney Talks About What the Railroads Knew and When About the Risk of Cancer and Exposure to Asbestos, Diesel Exhaust Fumes, etc.

The diesel exhaust data came from a 50-year study of  miners called, aptly, the Diesel Exhaust in Miners Study (DEMS). Between 1947 and 1997, federal researchers measured air pollution inside mines and tracked the health of the men and women who worked in the atmospheres saturated with diesel fumes. Analyses of the DEMS data conducted with funding from the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health revealed the lung cancer risk to workers most exposed to diesel exhaust. Those analyses were started before 1997, and papers were drafted for peer review as early as 2000.

A group of mining companies and fuel producers calling itself the Methane Awareness Resource Group filed suit in federal court to block circulation and, ultimately, publication of the DEMS papers on the grounds that research findings produced under government contracts are subject to review by members of Congress before being made public. That legal fine point is true, but the review is almost always pro forma, when it is conducted at all.

As an investigative report from the Center for Public Integrity notes, however, MARG not only succeeded in holding up dissemination of the diesel exhaust findings, the group won a judge’s order requiring industry review prior to publication. The 2001 court order kept the DEMS data out of print until 2012, an outcome the mining and fuel companies no doubt desired because they wanted to contest federal regulations on diesel exhaust. The corporations default critique has been that tougher diesel fume exposure standards lacked a scientific basis.

All during the legal proceedings, MARG has been fully supported by Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives. At one point, members of Congress went so far as to file a brief to a court on MARG’s behalf. At other times, congressmen have called on judges to enforce rulings favorable to the industry group.

Now, even with the data from the diesel exhaust study in print, MARG has obliquely threatened the editors and publishers of the Annals of Occupational Hygiene and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute with legal action. As fellow personal injury lawyer Maxwell S. Kennerly observed, however, the industry group doesn’t seem to have any grounds for a lawsuit because it has already compelled researchers to take the unprecedented step of sharing prepublication government data with a nongovernmental entity.

Yes. This is all so much inside baseball. But the details — which I’ve actually skimped on — are important to illustrate the lengths to which companies and their political patrons will go to in order to avoid liability for making employees sick.

Now that the truth about the dangers of diesel fumes is known, with even the New York Times and CBS News reporting on the cancer risks, it’s time to focus on how and why it took so long for the facts to get out. Industries must own up to the risks they require workers to face. When those risks become actual injuries and illnesses, companies must be held liable for compensating employees. This goes for Amtrak, CSX and Norfolk Southern as much as for trucking corporations and mine operators.

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly moderate the Yardlimits Railroad Community Forum and donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Randy Appleton, Railroad Cancer Victims’ Lawyer

In his latest post to our law firm’s Virginia Beach Injuryboard blog site, my rail employee occupational illness colleague Rick Shapiro shares details from a major long-term study that provides compelling evidence for a link between on-the-job exposure to diesel fumes and developing and dying from lung cancer. Rick calls on railroads from Amtrak to CSX and Norfolk Southern to pay attention to the study findings and to expand efforts to reduce rail employees’ exposure to diesel exhaust. To read more, click over to “Diesel Exhaust Raises Lung Cancer Risk, Suppressed Study Shows.”

EJL

About the Editors: The Virginia- and Carolina-based attorneys at Shapiro, Lewis & Appleton have long histories of representing railroad workers in FELA and other railroad injury cases and of helping victims of rail crossing accidents. Lawyers at our firm have served as chairmen of the railroad section of the American Association for Justice, the largest national victim’s injury attorney organization, and one of our attorneys wrote a major legal encyclopedia section on railroad safety litigation. Check out our railroad injury case results to see for yourself. Be sure to get your free reports about railroad injury, disease and wrongful death FELA cases: The Do’s and Don’ts When Injured at a Railroad — Yours FELA Rights and What Railroad Claim Agents Won’t Tell You (But You Must Know). Also, our railroad injury lawyers proudly moderate the Yardlimits Railroad Community Forum and donate to the Fallen Brother Fund.

By Randy Appleton, Railroad Cancer Victims’ Attorney

In his latest blog post our Virginia (VA) personal injury lawyers website, my colleague Rick Shapiro writes that more hospitals in our home state, North Carolina (NC), West Virginia (WV), Tennessee (TN) and elsewhere are adding cancer radiotherapy machines called CyberKnife or Gamma Knife. The machines allow doctors to better treat patient with advanced or complicated lung, brain, pancreatic and liver cancers in shorter times and with fewer side effects. To read more, click over to “Railroad Cancer Victims Could Have Hope in Targeted Radiosurgery.”

EJL