Maryland Injury and Disability Law : Washington DC Metro Injury & Disability Lawyer & Attorney : Greenberg & Bederman : Accidents, Falls, Medical Malpractice : Maryland, DC, Virginia

Law enforcement officers are supposed to be held to a higher standard than the rest of us. There are a few very good reasons for this. The first is that they are supposed to be the people who enforce the laws of our cities, counties and states. The second is that they are the only people in the country who have the right to take our freedom away from us. Administrative assistants can’t serve a warrant for your arrest. Restaurant employees can’t search you for drugs or weapons. Doctors and nurses can’t lead you away in handcuffs. The only people who can do any of those things are police or federal agents. If the police and agents are in charge of enforcing the law, then should also strictly adhere to the law. The obvious premise is that law enforcement officers are not supposed to break the law. It goes without saying that the rest of us aren’t supposed to either, but if those who are supposed to enforce the laws feel no compunction about violating those laws, it means that some laws don’t apply to some citizens, which renders the whole concept of law essentially meaningless.

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It’s not like we need any more examples as to how dangerous the escalator systems are on DC’s subways. Everyone knows that they are malfunctioning, poorly maintained and prone to sudden stoppages.

But regardless of whether we need another example or not, they seem to keep coming, which means that nothing is being done to fix the problems. This is not good.

On October 30, 2010, an escalator malfunctioned at L’Enfant Plaza. The brakes on this particular staircase failed, and a group of people were rushed down the stairs at a high rate of speed. When they reached the bottom there was essentially a pile up of bodies, in which four people were hurt. This brake failure happened the weekend of the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally. The entire subway system was packed with people. There was not one subway station in the entire system that was not loaded to capacity. It was a miracle that more people were not hurt.

The latest escalator failure took place at Foggy Bottom, which is the Metro stop used by students at George Washington University. The malfunction this time wasn’t a brake failure, which is dangerous enough. This time around four of the steps at the bottom of the escalator gave way and fell into the escalator machinery down below. This happened on the escalator that was the only functioning way out of the station.

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It’s not like we need any more examples as to how dangerous the escalator systems are on DC’s subways. Everyone knows that they are malfunctioning, poorly maintained and prone to sudden stoppages.

But regardless of whether we need another example or not, they seem to keep coming, which means that nothing is being done to fix the problems. This is not good.

On October 30, 2010, an escalator malfunctioned at L’Enfant Plaza. The brakes on this particular staircase failed, and a group of people were rushed down the stairs at a high rate of speed. When they reached the bottom there was essentially a pile up of bodies, in which four people were hurt. This brake failure happened the weekend of the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally. The entire subway system was packed with people. There was not one subway station in the entire system that was not loaded to capacity. It was a miracle that more people were not hurt.

The latest escalator failure took place at Foggy Bottom, which is the Metro stop used by students at George Washington University. The malfunction this time wasn’t a brake failure, which is dangerous enough. This time around four of the steps at the bottom of the escalator gave way and fell into the escalator machinery down below. This happened on the escalator that was the only functioning way out of the station.

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The D.C. area is doing the best it can to present itself as a bicycle friendly city. In some respects, it is. There are plenty of bike paths in the District, Maryland and Virginia, and this year the District and parts of Virginia began its Capital Bikeshare program, which essentially allows you to rent a bike for low costs. There are a lot of positive reasons for encouraging bicycle use in the D.C. area. Anyone who has spent any time in traffic here knows that there is nothing wrong with getting a few cars off the road.

But despite its appearances to the contrary, the District is certainly not a bicycle friendly area. The number of bicycle related fatalities in Washington, D.C. (bicyclists who were struck and killed by cars or trucks) reached 10 in 2010, which is 4 more than 2009. That might not seem like a lot in an area with the population of the D.C. area, but bicycle crashes where there are injuries averages around 350 per year.

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Believe it or not, not everyone in the Washington, D.C. area is involved with politics. When this area is portrayed in the movies or on television, it seems like everyone has a security clearance, or that everyone works diligently for one government agency or another. Characters in D.C. based-dramas are all aides to a Senator, or they work at the Pentagon, or they wear suits and attend top secret meetings, or they wheel and deal in the backrooms of fancy restaurants.

For those of us who actually live here, we know that portrayal to be false. Most of us don’t work for the government. Most of us aren’t “operatives,” political or otherwise. On any given day, there might be legislation in the House or Senate that causes a big stir among those who actually work on Capitol Hill, but the rest of us who don’t work there rarely notice such things.

Much of the work that goes on at the Federal level involves minutia. We don’t mean that in a condescending manner. We are sure that it is necessary minutia that needs to be addressed. But if legislation passes that changes the regulation width of the Styrofoam tray in which ground beef is packaged, that hardly has an effect on the day to day life of Washingtonians, or the rest of the citizens of the country for that matter. The rest of us are worried about raising our kids, doing our jobs and paying the mortgage.

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We occasionally read the blog Greater Greater Washington,mainly because we agree with much of its overall premise. The contributors are all very much in favor of smart city planning and development. What this means is that rather than having a dysfunctional city center surrounded by increasingly sprawling and resource wasting suburbs, it would seem to be a better idea to develop cities that manage to have efficient public transportation and easy access for bicyclists and pedestrians. Generally speaking, if there is an issue that involves urban planning in the D.C. area, Greater Greater Washington usually has a pretty smart take on it.

But it isn’t always the nuts and bolts of zoning board meetings or whether or not streetcars in D.C. would be a good idea. Occasionally you get something that is a lot more commonplace and every day, but goes a long way towards reminding you how easy it is to make your life and the lives of those around you safer.

For instance, a reader recently sent in an e-mail to the blog, and the gist of it was that a construction project in Northwest is occasionally blocking traffic in the area of E Street and 20^th. This block in the flow of traffic is not constant, but it happens often enough during the course of the day that those who live and work nearby are noticing a fairly high rate of honking horns and yelling drivers and drivers behaving aggressively. Granted, this is Washington, D.C, and punctuality means a great deal here. But what this e-mail brought home to us as car accident attorneys is that being somewhere on time is not worth your life. Nor is the road the place to settle minor and temporary grievances, particularly when you are behind the wheel of a vehicle that weighs thousands of pounds.

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Much has been made lately of the Food and Drug Administration’s authority on the marketing and sale of pharmaceutical drugs. These powers were expanded dramatically in 2007, but were only recently put into practice with the withdrawal of a certain type of painkillers from American shelves. In other words, the FDA had been granted broad new regulatory powers, but only put them into practice this year. In the interim, several dangerous drugs were allowed to stay on the market, despite being banned in other countries and despite being broadly suspected of being harmful to the patients who used them. This makes us wonder what the FDA was waiting for.

The first drug that the FDA actually did something about was a painkiller called Darvon, and its generic equivalent Darvocet. It wasn’t exactly new information that something was wrong with it. This painkiller has been on the market since 1957. Its main ingredient is an opioid called propoxyphene, which is meant to handle light to moderate pain. So while it certainly isn’t nearly as addictive as OxyContin or Vicodin, the dangers with propoxyphene-based drugs lie elsewhere.

The main problem is that propoxyphene appears to cause damage to the heart. There have been several studies that lead to that conclusion. In fact, the FDA had already recalled the drug twice since 1978. Both recalls were essentially negated when the FDA failed to find anything conclusive. The regulatory agencies of the United Kingdom and the European Union had no such difficulties in seeing the problem, and banned Darvon and Darvocet in 2005 and 2009, respectively. The FDA only got around to banning Darvocet and Darvon in November of 2010.

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