Baum Hedlund's Litigation Experience in Faulty Design, Structural and Maintenance Accidents

The firm handled it's first bridge collapse case in 1989. Considered one of the worst 10 bridge collapses in U.S. history, the Hatchie River bridge collapsed near Covington, Tennessee on April 1, 1989 when an 85-foot section of the bridge fell into the rain-swollen Hatchie River because rushing water had weakened bridge supports. Four passenger cars and a tractor-trailer rig plunged into the river, killing all occupants. In all, eight people were killed.

A federal investigation found that the river channel had moved 83 feet since the bridge was built in 1936, and that the bridge likely failed as a result of the deterioration of timber piles that were originally buried and not designed to be in water.

After the Hatchie River bridge collapse, Tennessee started using divers every five years to check for underwater problems. At the national level concerns grew deeper that the national problem of aging bridges would only increase with time and that more and more bridges would become a risk. 

Federal law now requires the inspection of all bridges at least every two years but state and federal enforcement of repairs is lacking.

The firm then handled another bridge collapse only days later, on April 15, 1989 in Oliver Springs, Tennessee. A wooden bridge spanning the Southern Railway collapsed as a truck attempted to cross, leaving one man dead and two men injured.

During the Loma Prieta quake in the San Francisco Bay area on October 17, 1989, the facade of a building owned by Gap tumbled down on pedestrians and cars below, killing our client's son. In the suit against the building owners we alleged that the owners of the building were warned by engineers who worked for them that the structure could collapse in a "medium to large" "seismic event" (earthquake) but did not strengthen the building or warn tenants of the danger.

San Francisco's building code requires seismic strengthening of unreinforced masonry buildings that have had substantial changes in use. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, city real estate records at that time revealed that the Gap building at Sixth and Bluxome streets was an unreinforced masonry structure that was built in 1908 as a warehouse.

Baum Hedlund attorney and mechanical engineer, Paul J. Hedlund, later testified before the California Seismic Safety Commission about seismic safety as a result of his client's sons' death in the Loma Prieta Earthquake.

Our firm has handled other structural integrity cases including the collapse of a train trestle bridge near Saraland, Alabama in 1993 after it was struck by a barge, killing 47 people.

We also handled the collapse of the Northridge Meadows Apartments as a result of the Northridge, CA  earthquake in 1994. The apartments were built in a very shoddy fashion. The most flagrant of the building violations was the fact that instead of using plywood, as called for in the building plans, diagonal strips of 1 by 6 inch wood under 1 1/2 inches of concrete were used to form the second and third floors. Properly sized sheets of plywood would have provided more resistance to the quake. The apartments were also built with nails that were too small, joist hangers that were half the size as specified in the plans, and metal pipes supporting apartment units over parking spaces were inadequate and not as specified.