Joe Penny surrenders

My 29 years of experience agrees.

"You'd like that wouldn't you?... get your name in the National Geographic..."

The answer is simple...remove the warning signs and have a "lawyers only" day at the beach. Nature will take care of the rest.

These two funboys are unavailable for comment

I was once told of two doctors fresh out of Med School who opened up a practice together. Given their massive debt, and the heinous price of insurance, they opted not to have any. They posted a sign in their waiting room: "We do not carry malpractice insurance." Never got sued, 'cause you can't take anything from someone who has nothing. That's the problem: people sue people who have money because they HAVE MONEY.

bump beat me to it....

Oh well.

I shall now wait for an excellent "Tales of the Gold Monkey" reference. Until then...

Only now some asshat can point to this and say they deliberately withheld information that the tides were dangerous.

Double the damages to the plaintiff! *raps gavel*

Could they sue if the riptide took place in a cup of very hot coffee?

Sign Sign everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign


/drtfa

Of course there was the story a few months back where a guy dove off a bridge with a "no diving" sign, became paraplegic, and won a $1,000,000 suit from the city because the sign should hae said "diving is dangerous" instead.

link to story: http://spaces.msn.com/members/s51/

I think the city is probably onto something

"People with children will pay attention," she said. "Teenagers won't."

Teenagers don't read signs? Hmmmm.... maybe if they're all sucked into the rip tide they'll finally stay off of mah goddamn lawn!

"Please drown at your own risk"

Would that sign be legally safe to post?

This is not the first time I've heard of such things. Often companies (and and municipalities) have less legal exposer when they make no comment on a danger than if they do not give an ironclad idiot proof warning (which does not exist).

Every time I've tried to build something idiot proof in manufacturing, to assist the assemblers, they built a better idiot.

/"The more I think about it ol' Billy was right. Let's kill all the lawyers and kill them tonight."

just have a sign that says 'swim at your own risk'
wtf?

Another prime example of the screwed up nature of our legal system. You try to do the right thing, and if you don't do it 100% correct, you're screwed. However, you can simply stand by and refuse to inform your fellow human beings regarding their safety and not have to worry about a thing.

People in general are going to be ignorant about phenomena in a new environment. Signs help let people know they are present. If a person does not know what the phenomena is, perhaps they should grow some testicles and ASK someone what it is, and how to avoid it.

COMING SOON:

This sign requires a minimum of 12th grade reading level

Warning: This area is subject to rapid and unpredicable tectonic plate shifts. These shifts can cause massive movement in both vertical and horizontal directions. When these shifts occur you are expected to resort to human instincts of self-preservation. No one can help you but yourself.

Rip current rescue photo gallery http://www.usla.org/photo/default.asp?dir=Rescues

Did it for 8 years.

I don't know NJ tort law and did not RTFA, but it makes sense to me as I used to work in insurance defense, including representing municipalities. I assume rip tides can be classified as an "act of God" or "force majeour." In most states an act of God cannot be predicted and there is no liability for it. However, if you try to make things better by doing a silly thing like posting a sign about a danger, you may be liable for an inadequate warning.

Sure, it's wrong that someone tries to make things safer and gets stung for being negligent for doing so. I also worked as a plaintiff's personal injury attorney and used to jump all over this sort of thing. What? You shoveled the snow off of your sidewalk? Silly you. It is no longer an act of God, but now negligence.

/so glad I do not practice law anymore.

Someone here once floated the idea of putting in fake security cameras in some of our computer labs. But one of our employees told us of a lawsuit at his former place of employment. Seems this girl was all alone in a compter room somewhere on campus late at night. She knew there was (what she thought was) a camera in that room and figured she was "safe"; that no one would do anything because they'd be on tape. The camera was a fake, not hooked up to or watched/monitored by anything. She got raped.

We don't have cams because we can't afford the backend infrastructure to record them all 24/7/365, thus providing the measure of "safety" that will be assumed.

And the sign said anybody swimming would be caught in the riptide
So I jumped in the water and yelled at the sign -- Hey, what gives you the righhhhhghghgh ghgh ghghgggggggerrrp glorp

With that logic, every ambulance chaser's head should be asploding right about now...

/popping sounds in distance
//satisfying

So, Farkeologist, that would be your ROFLcopter?

/ Prefers the young lady with the motorized hairdo.
// 'prefers' as in 'would hit'

I would like to see darwinisim claim all the lawyers... Oh and did anyone mention that this is the same strip of coastline where the shark attack occured?? Perhaps the signs should read "Swim at your own risk - Being caught in a Rip Tide instantly drops you down a notch on the food chain - Darwinisim WILL ensue"

Scummy:

That's the Screaming Mimi, from the television series "Riptide."

Rip Tide?

nytmare:

I'm gonna add "glorp" to "wantonly" on my list of fun words today. Thanks.

I hear that Long Beach Island is offering free beach badges to Lawyers

//wanting sooooo bad for the hilarity to ensue

These sorts of things happen all the time. In our office, we have as few policies as possible because if you don't have a policy, you can't be accused of not following it when somebody comes around looking to win the legal lottery. It is true that not having a policy incurs less risk than having a policy and not folllowing it or having what a lawyer or jury consider to be an inadequate policy.

/Hope mattharvest's personal injury practice is doing well
//just my little attempt at a flamewar

Would posting "Swim at your own risk" along with "Caution: riptide" carry any legal protection for the town?

This is just so sdrawkcab that it makes a weird sort of sense.

Get rid of ALL warning signs, let common sense & darwin take care of the rest.

However... how does this explain NON-act-of-god stupidity like several locked doors & a fence & warnings signs, someone takes the time to go through all those, gets hurt, sues and WINS??

Can any lawyers/law-knowing people find fault with the following for those situations:

"Do not go in here without authorization. If you do, you risk extreme injury or death."

What about people who can't read, for some reason?

All this "I got hurt because I did something dangerous and nobody told me/prevented me" nonsense HAS to stop.

nytmare wins!
Flawless victory!

/glorp

Farkeologist
Screaming Mimi from _Riptide_.

Not familiar with that program.
... does it actually, like, scream?

/ thanks

Thanks BXRWXR, because without you I would have read the following line from the article....

"Don Myers, supervisor of the Long Beach Beach Patrol, said if swimmers find themselves swept up in a rip current, they should not try to swim directly against it to get to shore"

as a ACCEPT YOUR FATE kinda message, lol.

Wait a second, I thought everyone knew what to do in a rip current. You swim parallel to shore and work your way in gradually. If you try to swim straight to shore you will exhaust yourself and drown.

Isn't this common knowledge?

(RTFA)

Sheila Pesce of Barnegat said many people are ignorant of what to do when they are caught in situations like Heisner's, and that signs could help.

"Nobody knows to swim parallel with (the shore)," she said.

Guess not...

They should get Hasselhoff on the job, he'd fix their problem real quick!

Firefly4F4
""Do not go in here without authorization. If you do, you risk extreme injury or death."
Yes, unfortunatelly in most of America that is how the premise liability laws work. The land owner is expected to make their property safe, even for tresspassers who know they are trespassing (i.e. read the sign).

"Would posting "Swim at your own risk" along with "Caution: riptide" carry any legal protection for the town?"

No because the sign didn't tell me (being your average moron looking to win the lawsuit lottery) that swimming was actually dangerous and because I don't know what a riptide is. If you make another sign explaining that swimming is dangerous and yet another explaining what riptides are and why they are dangerous then you'll have so many signs that I can't reasonably be expected to read them. Plus I won't notice them, so you obviously didn't make them visible enough. Not to mention if there is such a risk of death then you obviously should not let people swim here.

No matter what sign you put up, there is a moron with a good lawyer who will shoot it down in court. Unfortunately we seem to be bred with the idea that expecting absolute safety is reasonable, when in fact living is highly dangerous at all times and expecting to be safe is just a sign that you are an idiot.

If they really want to keep people out of the water, they should litter the beach with broken glass, sharp metal poles, rusty nails, land mines, barbed wire and maybe have a few sharks with freakin' laserbeams on their heads offshore ...

/obvious?

Now who is looking out for the innocent little sharkies? Who will defend them in a court if they by-chance eat a bikini-whale thats full of McDonalds and processed crap and as a result suffer a fatal intestinal blockage??

Oh my head is asploding with the joy of a potential Lawyers vs. Darwinism scenario.

/end pseudo-rant

I personally would set up signs saying "I dare you to swim here, Mr. Big Shot" and let it all sort itself out.

You would think the town would just pass a law saying they can't be sued.

I wish drowning lawyers was legal...

oh it's ensuing. it's ensuing.

mattharvest
Yes but just because something is legal doesn't make it right, and people suing just because they're too stupid to live certainly isn't right :)