Back in March of this year, your Charleston child injury and death attorneys remember hearing about, but not posting an entry on, a horrific accident involving a miniature train ride. The accident occurred in Spartanburg’s Cleveland Park when the miniature train derailed and flipped into a ditch. Now, according to authorities, excessive speed was to blame for the accident that killed a 6-year-old boy and injured dozens of others.
Thanks to a video shot by one of the young passengers investigators were able to determine the mini train was traveling more than 20 mph, which is nearly three times the recommended speed for such a ride. One investigator and accident reconstruction specialist said, “Too Fast. That was the complete cause of the accident, just too fast.”
But, the attorney for the train’s operator says his client is not totally to blame for the fatal accident. According to the operator’s attorney, the speedometer on the train wasn’t working properly and his client was never informed that there was a maximum speed he was not to exceed, and for the cause of this accident to be solely operator error, his client would have had to do something he was told not to do. Furthermore, he claims the device intended to restrict the train to a safe speed was never set correctly.
The operator’s lawyer makes several valid points, considering the State’s safety inspector responsible for checking the ride admitted after the crash that he had falsified the report to approve the ride for operation because a dead battery prevented him from testing the ride. However, investigators said Monday that there were no mechanical issues with the train or the tracks.
Regardless if the ride was mechanically sound, there were shortcuts taken leading up to the serious train accident, and now it seems there is an issue of pinpointing who is most at fault, the train’s operator or those in charge of overseeing the train ride as a whole.
Since the accident one family has filed a lawsuit. The suit accuses County Officials of inadequately supervising the train operator or ensuring proper inspection of Cleveland Park’s tracks, also it alleges that State Officials failed in their inspection of the train prior to the crash, as well.
Your South Carolina wrongful death lawyers want to point out these types of suits seeking compensation for medical expenses, as well as damages are coming along at an interesting time as Lawmakers in Columbia want to revise State Law concerning injury suits, effectively limiting how much injured individuals could seek for medical bills and other expenses. A pending bill would rule out medical expenses from the current $600,000 per-occurrence liability cap, which protects the State and government agencies from paying unlimited damages, regardless if there are multiple state entities that are liable for the injuries suffered by individuals.
