Accidents

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

A man was recovering Monday after a fight in a Dodger Stadium parking lot following Sunday's game, renewing questions about how quickly and effectively security responds once a game ends. The fight began about 9 p.m. after a minor traffic accident. According to Los Angeles police, Arthur Morales, 30, knocked the victim to the ground while his pregnant girlfriend watched, stunned. At that point, Morales' friends got out of the vehicle and joined in. "They held the victim down on the ground and ... the fourth one kicked and punched him in the head," LAPD Cmdr.

For scuba divers, one of the world's great cold-water destinations is the kelp forest of Monterey Bay, with its rich sea life, which includes everything from starfish to sea otters. As many as 1,000 divers walk in or drop off boats into the bay on busy weekends. Lately, though, the bay has been unusually treacherous.

TheU.S. Coast Guardhas temporarily suspended offshore yacht racing in the San Francisco Bay Area after an accident earlier this month killed five of eight crew members near the rugged Farallon Islands. At least two races, one scheduled for Saturday, will be rerouted while US Sailing -  the sport's national governing body - conducts an independent review of Bay Area offshore racing procedures.  Coast Guard officials said they also were  "calling on all offshore race organizers and participants to conduct their own safety stand-downs during this period.

In 2008, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration released a study examining fatal accidents in which a car's air bag should have deployed but didn't. The most common reason wasn't poor manufacturing by automakers. It was that the air bag was simply missing, never replaced after a previous crash. The numbers weren't large, averaging 51 accidents a year nationwide over the five years studied. But that doesn't mean there's no cause for concern. Who knows how many more cars are on the road without air bags?

In a sting aimed at curbing accidents along the Blue Line, police and sheriff's deputies staked out a two-mile stretch of the line's tracks in downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday and ticketed nearly 300 jaywalkers and drivers they caught using cellphones and making illegal left turns. Transportation officials said the crackdown was the latest effort in a push to improve safety along the Blue Line, the city's oldest and most popular light rail line but also its most dangerous. Ninety-nine people have died in accidents and suicides involving the line in the nearly 20 years since the service from Los Angeles to Long Beach began.

Erected only two weeks ago in what has become a grim rite of spring, the big, red-lettered sign beside the churning Kern River is already outdated. As motorists enter the winding Kern River Canyon with their freight of sunscreen and fishing rods and beer, it tells them about the river with no minced words: "234 lives lost since 1968."

In the hours before she lighted a campfire that, so far, has burned 62,000 acres of the Sequoia National Forest, Peri Van Brunt allegedly smoked methamphetamine and stalked her estranged husband, following him to the Roads End Resort near where the fire started last Sunday, according to a federal criminal complaint filed here Friday. A tearful Van Brunt, 45, appeared in U.S. District Court on charges of setting the fire "willfully and without authority."

For as long as San Pedrans can remember, the stark beauty of the Point Fermin cliffs has drawn photographers, model plane enthusiasts and wedding planners. But old-timers know that the steep, rock-strewn bluffs -- featured in a scene in the movie "Chinatown" -- have a haunting history as well. In the last two decades, a number of people have fallen to their deaths there in tragic accidents and suicides, their bodies discovered far below on jagged rocks at the ocean's edge.

People who wear headphones might want to ditch them while walking outside. A study finds that accidents involving pedestrians wearing the devices have tripled in recent years. Researchers combed several sources to find incidents in the U.S. of crashes involving pedestrians and vehicles between 2004 and 2011. Searching the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Google News archives and Westlaw Campus Research. They found 116 cases of death or injury involving pedestrians wearing headphones.

Members of the U.S. military — especially enlisted troops in the Army and Marines — were significantly more likely to cause auto accidents within six months of returning from deployment, according to a study by USAA Property and & Casualty Insurance Group, a major insurer for military families. These veterans probably are engaging in survival driving habits for a war zone, such as not stopping in traffic, driving fast and making sudden, unpredictable turns, experts said. But those same driving practices create havoc back in the United States.

Since she won four medals at the 2008 Olympics, including a gold in the balance beam, Shawn Johnson has retired from her sport, written a book, won the mirror ball trophy on "Dancing With the Stars," torn up her knee while skiing and had reconstructive surgery. Oh, yeah, and she's doing gymnastics again. Johnson, 20, who came to the Beijing Games as defending world all-around champion and Olympic favorite, accepted her silver all-around medal, one rung below American teammate Nastia Liukin, with both a smile and tears.

SAN FRANCISCO — The winds gusted above 25 knots and the swells topped 12 feet. In short, sailors participating in this year's race around the craggy Farallon Islands, 27 miles west of the Golden Gate, faced typically grueling conditions. Then something went terribly wrong. A rogue wave pummeled the 38-foot Low Speed Chase as it rounded the islands Saturday, knocking five crew members overboard. As the captain sought to rescue them from the 50-degree water, the boat capsized and was hurled onto the rocks.

Arkansas fired football Coach Bobby Petrino on Tuesday, saying he engaged in reckless behavior that included hiring his mistress and then intentionally misleading his bosses about their relationship and her presence at the motorcycle accident that ultimately cost him his job. "He made the decision to mislead the public, [and it] adversely affected the university and the football program," Athletic Director Jeff Long said at an evening news conference, choking up at one point as he discussed telling players the news.

Benjamin Franklin once said there are two certainties in life: death and taxes. Now, researchers have found that taxes might make death just a little more certain. Deaths from traffic accidents rise 6% on tax day, that mid-April paroxysm of collective financial agony, according to a study published in Wednesday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Assn. A pair of Canadian researchers tallied up U.S. tax day traffic fatalities for each year between 1980 and 2009, then compared the figures to those from two "control" days, exactly one week before and one week after.

Bobby Petrino was hurt in a motorcycle crash Sunday night, but the 51-year-old Arkansas football coach is listed in stable condition and is expected to make a full recovery, according to a statement released by his family Monday morning. Petrino crashed his motorcycle after veering off a highway near the town of Crosses in Madison County, Ark., and was taken to a hospital for treatment, state police said. Zack Higbee, a spokesman for Petrino, had no comment on the accident Monday and would not even say if Petrino was involved.

The message of the proposed freeway signs doesn't seem controversial, memorializing individuals killed in traffic accidents and urging California motorists to drive safely. But a proposal to allow families to pay the California Department of Transportation to put up dozens of such signs along state highways has been caught up in a revolt by environmentalists against what they see as the growing clutter of signs and billboards along California roadways. The latest flare-up involves plans to expand a program that allows families to pay $1,000 to cover the cost of signs that read, "Please Don't Drink and Drive -- In Memory of . . ."

About the Project This is the result of six months of research and reporting by Tribune Auto Race Writer Ed Hinton, with help from staffers at other Tribune papers, among them Darin Esper of the Los Angeles Times. It sheds new light on the decline of traditional fatalism among race drivers and the need for more research and action to prevent the violent deaths the sport has come to accept.

Acknowledging major problems with the quality of its investigations into serious traffic collisions involving officers, the Los Angeles Police Department on Tuesday announced new rules intended to improve the thoroughness and credibility of the inquiries. The move follows a pair of Los Angeles Times articles in January that examined the human and financial toll of officer-involved accidents. The Times found that police caused about 1,250 crashes over the last three years — an average of about one a day. Most were minor, but some resulted in life-threatening injuries or were the result of the officer violating traffic laws, according to LAPD records.