New Jersey Personal Injury Law Blog

With so many dangerous and defective products on the marketplace, it's important to keep track of documented cases involving injuries, recalls and other safety concerns. That's why a key federal safety agency has created a new database to record this important data.

If you have harmed by a dangerous product, you can take action by discussing it with a New Jersey product liability attorney. You can also go online and make a complaint about a product in the online database maintained by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

The CPSC database empowers consumers to keep each other informed about dangerous products on the market. Manufacturers and distributors of products are trying to push back against this empowerment by pursuing a legal challenge.

An unnamed manufacturing company - identified only as "Company Doe" in court papers - has filed a motion in federal court in Maryland trying to stop the CPSC from publishing complaints online.

It's been exactly one year since the explosion of a natural gas pipeline in San Bruno, California, killed eight people and destroyed an entire residential neighborhood.

On this first anniversary of that terrible incident, it is reasonable to ask what the investigation into its causes has revealed about pipeline safety - and its implications for premises liability cases when things go terribly wrong.

In a report released on August 30, the National Transportation Safety Board assigned responsibility for the San Bruno to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. for failing to take action on obvious deficiencies in the pipeline. A flaw in the seam weld had been there since the pipeline's installation in 1956. This flaw could have been discovered by even the most basic inspection of the pipeline, but PG&E failed to do that.

NTSB Chairwoman Deborah Hersman was crystal clear in her statement about the findings. "It was not a question of if this pipeline would burst," she said. "It was a question of when."

Although it was a bungled repair job that set the explosion in motion, the underlying problem had been there all along.

Most people know that at least a few basic things about drunk driving law in the United States. One of these things is that the blood-alcohol limit is 0.08 percent. If someone is driving with that much or more alcohol in his or her system, it constitutes drunk driving.

This is the case in New Jersey and across the country.

High BAC levels can lead to terrible motor vehicle accidents. In fact, according to new research, even BAC levels that fall short of the criminal offense of drunk driving can often cause accidents.

Two sociologists at the University of California, San Diego, analyzed data on accidents and injuries in an accident-tracking database called the Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The FARS database contains information on every fatal vehicle accident in the United States. The information dates back to 1994 and involves nearly 1.5 million people.

Two months ago, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission launched a new website for tracking consumer complaints about product safety. The new, central source of information was one part of broader Congressional action in 2008 intended to improve the safety of toys and other products that can injure children.

The legislation was formally known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). Safety advocates believe it has already made a real difference, particularly in making imported toys safer.

Now, however, there are concerns that Congress is about to undo some of what it accomplished. On May 12, a House subcommittee voted to place limitations on who is allowed to enter information into the new database. The subcommittee also voted to change the existing restrictions on lead in products aimed at children, and to allow daycare centers to use cribs that do not meet current safety standards.