Jury Awards More Than $40 Million To Woman Injured By Train At Dangerous Crossing
26 Jul 2007
Missouri - A Jackson County jury awarded more than $40 million to a Sedalia, Mo., woman who suffered brain damage and more than 20 broken bones in a 1997 train-crossing accident.
Jurors also found Union Pacific Railroad Co. liable for punitive damages, which could add millions more to what already is probably Missouri's largest rail-crossing-accident verdict.
Union Pacific is 75 percent at fault, the jury decided, and Amtrak 25 percent as the jurors awarded actual damages of nearly $40.37 million. The jurors will now hear arguments in the punitive damages phase in the trial.
In closing arguments, plaintiff's lawyers accused Union Pacific of doing nothing to install lights and gates at the crossing a quarter-mile south of U.S. 50 near Warrensburg, Mo.
They told jurors that 34-year-old Kimberly Alcorn lived with pain ""like a window into hell"" because Union Pacific waited instead of paying $200,000 for lights and gates. ""This case is about corporate greed? It's about putting dollars ahead of lives.""
State officials had told the company 11 months before the Aug. 29, 1997, accident that the crossing was dangerous.
Union Pacific waited for government subsidies to pay for installing lights and gates, plaintiff lawyers argued. And the railroad kept waiting, even after an Amtrak train hit a vehicle there four months before the accident that disabled Alcorn.
Lawyers also cited testimony that Amtrak engineers did not apply brakes until after the train hit the car Alcorn was in. The train was traveling at 65 to 70 mph. The mother of two teen-agers suffered brain damage, broken bones and disfiguring injuries.
The jury found that the automobile driver was not at fault, but that Union Pacific had acted ""with complete indifference to or conscious disregard for the safety of others.""
The Unsafe Grade Crossing Danger Is Nationwide
Railroads maintain private roadbeds that intersect more than 160,000 public highways in the United States. More than 5,000 collisions occur at these intersections each year, resulting in almost 600 fatalities and 1,800 injuries. A motor vehicle/train collision is many times more likely to produce fatalities than a roadway collision.
Despite the accumulation of statistics such as these there remain many unsafe rail crossings. Some are unsafe because of a failure to maintain the safety equipment in place at the crossing; others are unsafe because no safety equipment has been installed.
Florida has a number of rural crossings that sorely need attention. And, because of the high number of tourists driving unfamiliar roads, it is not unexpected that out-of-state drivers would be especially at risk when approaching a poorly marked or badly maintained grade crossing.
Verdicts against a careless and negligent railroad when there has been injury or death as a result of corporate misconduct in the maintenance of a crossing are one means of encouraging more attention to safety.
