Greenup County Kentucky Legal Blog

It’s hard to believe that your child is teenager. You remember the day they were born like it was yesterday. Memories of their first steps, words and when they learned to talk are easy to recall. You’ve been watching your child flourish and grow. You taught them how to walk, ride a bike—both with and without training wheels—and now it’s time for them to get behind the wheel.

You know that your child is both excited and nervous to drive. While you encourage this new endeavor, you are also anxious. Distracted driving is top on your list of things to chat with them about, but since they will be using several county and back roads, you may want to talk to them about how to drive on unpaved roads as well.

With warmer weather on its way, you may start planning on installing a backyard swimming pool. While you are perfectly able to put a pool on your property, you do have to obey local ordinances to ensure your pool is legal. Such regulations are put in place by Kentucky officials to help ensure safety. Every year children end up drowning in backyard pools. In some cases, the child wandered into someone else's yard, thus making that person liable. To help keep others safe and protect yourself, you must understand the enclosure laws in your area.

According to the Department of Housing, Buildings and Construction, you must have a safety barrier, typically a fence, around your swimming pool area. This safety barrier must not have a gap between the ground and the bottom of the fence of more than four inches nor should any other gaps in the fence be more than four inches. Cutouts for decorative purposes must be less than 1 3/4 inches wide. It must also be at least four feet tall. If you make a barrier out of stone or other similar construction materials, they cannot protrude in a way that would make it easy for someone to climb over the barrier. 

A common reason for many personal injury claims in Kentucky is car accidents. Motor vehicles are the most dangerous form of travel, so it is no surprise that they result in countless injuries each day. The reasons such accidents occur are varied, but one identified cause is aggressive driving. This is also referred to as road rage, which WebMD describes as purposeful unsafe driving actions that disregard safety. 

Road rage can be minor or severe. An incident could be as simple as cutting in front of another driver because you are annoyed by how slow they are going. More severe incidents include instances of drivers shooting other drivers. It is not always easy to determine why you may suffer from road rage, but in its most basic form it is caused when you are offended by how someone else is driving. However, going from being annoyed by another driver to taking physical action against that driver requires there to be underlying aggression. 

Black lung disease can strike coal miners, whether on the job or sometime after leaving a coal mine, due to the coal dust miners inhale in their lungs. If you happen to be someone who suffers from black lung disease or if you suspect you may have it, the federal government offers a type of workers’ compensation under the Black Lung Benefits Act (BLBA). According to Findlaw, the BLBA provides Kentucky residents with compensation for a number of services and medical treatments.

Travel to a doctor’s office is one such example. If you want to take a trip to a doctor’s office or a clinic, or perhaps a different medical facility, your travel expenses will be covered so long as the trip to and from your destination does not exceed two hundred miles. The BLBA also comes into play if you need emergency care, as ambulance trips to a hospital for emergency care related to acute black lung disease are also covered.