San Antonio Legal Blog

Drivers in Texas can certainly benefit from the one hour of sleep they gain with the end of daylight saving time, but they should know that risks are involved. Changes in sleep patterns give rise to drowsiness, which can affect driving for at least a day or two after they occur. The end of DST also causes some people to stay up late the night before and think that the extra hour will make up for it, but this also leads to drowsiness.

Another problem is that with the end of DST, many drivers will be making their commute home in the dark. Night driving, as everyone knows, is fraught with dangers. It makes sense, then, that the Insurance Bureau of British Columbia reports that car crashes during the late afternoon commute are more frequent in the two weeks after DST ends than in the two weeks leading up to it.

OSHA has penalized a petroleum refiner and an industrial contractor with $106,080 in fines after a worker in a confined space lost air supply and died from asphyxiation. Workers in Texas may want to know how the two parties were negligent.

According to reports, the Alabama petroleum refiner failed to evaluate all hazards in the confined space and did not document all of the steps that are required to ensure the safety of workers in such spaces. It also failed to conduct periodic evaluations of the industrial contractor to ensure that the latter was fulfilling the obligations laid down by the Process Safety Management standard.

Given the number of motorists that utilize San Antoni's roads, car accidents are almost viewed as being an inevitability (despite the best efforts of local residents in trying to implement defensive driving practices). Indeed, according to information shared by the Association for Safe International Road Travel, 2.35 million Americans are injured in car accidents every year. It is when drivers do not attempt to drive defensively that those who suffer in accidents that they cause question their fitness for being behind the wheel. That questioning might even extend to who would allow such a driver to have access to a vehicle. 

The legal principle of negligent entrustment allows car accident victims to assign vicarious liability to the owners of the vehicles that caused their accidents (even if those owners were not driving their vehicles at the time). The logic supporting this doctrine is that vehicle owners should be responsible when loaning their cars out to others and not allow drivers who have proven themselves to be reckless or inexperienced behind the wheel to have access to their vehicles. 

If you are in business, then you know that the pressure to please your clients in San Antonio is ever-present. Thus, you may be willing to do whatever you can to meet (or even exceed) their expectations, even to the point of straining the resources available to you. Commercial freight carriers also experience this pressure. Their customer satisfaction is typically gauged by how quickly their drivers can complete their delivery routes. Due to the demand to make deliveries in a timely manner, carriers may enforce route times. Unfortunately, we here at The Law Offices of Miller & Bicklein, P.C. have seen the unintended consequences of such enforcement. 

Truck drivers who operate their vehicles as excessive speeds present a great danger to you and others required to share the road with them. You might view the decision of a truck driver to speed as the ultimate sign of negligence. These professionals are familiar with the capacities (and limitations) of their vehicles, and thus should know better than to operate them in a manner that is unsafe. Yet what if the decision to speed is not on that they make by choice, but rather compulsion?