The SUV that the governor was in was run into by another vehicle who was trying to avoid a collision. Unfortunately, it appears the governor was not wearing his seat belt and his vehicle may have been speeding. This automobile accident involving an important government official puts the spotlight on how all of us are vulnerable to being severely hurt on the road.
The governor is going to have leg surgery as a result of this car crash. He has been under heavy sedation and on a ventilator in the hospital for days since the accident. The governor’s femur bone was broken in two places but he also suffered a broken sternum, 12 broken ribs, a head cut, and a fracture of one of his vertebrae. Although the injuries were not considered life threatening, Corzine’s injuries are obviously severe. He was flown by helicopter after the crash to the hospital.
Another interesting aspect of this news item was that the air bags on the governor’s vehicle may not have deployed properly. There is a whole area of litigation about air bag failure. Sometimes air bags fail because they were not properly designed. It is not clear to me in reading the news piece whether the failure of the air bag to deploy worsened the injuries in this crash. Much of my information for this blog article is based upon the Virginian Pilot newspaper (see www.pilotonline.com).
Obviously, when a governor has serious broken bones and other injuries in a car wreck, it is news. It makes me think about all those people who suffer equally severe injuries each day on Virginia and the nation’s roads whose accidents and injuries we don’t hear about.
