Eastern Connecticut |
Seventy-four-year-old Shin-Chia Tan doesn't remember hearing anyone scream when the packed bus heading to Mohegan Sun hit a guardrail and toppled onto a snowy Interstate 95 in February.
As the sound of blaring horns and squealing tires filled the air, he and the 54 others on the bus seemed to lose their voices, perhaps aware of how little control they had over the situation. Tan, a Flushing, N.Y., resident originally from Taiwan, was just one of at least 36 passengers injured Feb. 8 when the Dahlia Group Inc. bus flipped over in Madison. At least six of them were in critical condition for a period of time. A state police report confirms Tan's version of the story: Keyi Zhang, the 63-year-old driver from Flushing, lost control while merging from the right to the left lane, closing I-95 north for 4½ hours. An investigation by The Day shows that while Dahlia Group and other bus lines serving casinos repeatedly are cited for unsafe driving, vehicle maintenance and other violations — some at a higher rate than others — most of them continue to operate. Dahlia Group and its drivers have been cited with 38 violations — ranging from driving too fast to drinking while driving — since February 2014, according to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. By the safety administration's standards, the 33 violations racked up by Dahlia's New York branch — it also has one in Boston — mean 83 percent of motor carriers in the same category have better on-road safety performance than it does. The safety administration calculates an unsafe driving measure based on the number and severity of violations, the number of vehicles and the miles traveled by each vehicle. By far, Dahlia has the worst rating of the buses that travel regularly to Mohegan Sun and Foxwoods. Yet Dahlia continues to run as many as 14 buses between Mohegan Sun and Flushing each day, according to the website of VMC Travel Express, the agency that books buses including Dahlia. Mohegan Sun lists 20 bus companies and three booking agencies on its website for customers to use, under either "line runs" or "Asian line runs." Dahlia isn't listed, although VMC Travel Express is. Other agencies listed include I-Fun Entertainment and Oriental Travel LLC. The former books trips on buses owned by Cash World Tours Inc., whose rating with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration is "conditional," which is similar to being on probation. The latter runs SOE Tour Inc. buses. On March 2, one of those buses burst into flames and filled the highway with thick black smoke while en route to Mohegan Sun from Boston. All 45 passengers escaped without injury. Read more at http://www.theday.com/local/20160326/13-casino-bus-not-always-bargain/1.
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For 48-year-old Kate, two things run in the family: nursing and addiction.
After overcoming alcohol and cocaine addiction in her early 20s to become a registered nurse in her late 20s, she thought she was in the clear. But within four years of getting her license, a downward spiral that went from a pelvic fracture to an ugly divorce found Kate sneaking into the waste medication closet of the nursing home where she worked, lifting oxycodone and Xanax. Kate agreed to share her story on the condition The Day maintains her anonymity. "It was kind of subtle," Kate said of the years leading up to when she was caught stealing drugs. "I never had the idea, 'well I think I'm going to end up being an addict,' but ultimately that's where it led." Now more than a year-and-a-half sober, Kate said people still are surprised when they hear her story, wondering how a nurse could wind up an addict. But Kate said the access nurses have, coupled with their mentality, should make it less than shocking. "In nursing, we're taught that medication solves problems," she said. "That's what we do. We change meds. We start meds. We stop meds. It's very much an ingrained idea in many nurses' thought processes. Even when I was using I was acutely aware of other nurses with similar problems — you know, it takes one to know one." It's hard to say just how many nurses are affected by substance abuse, according to Maureen Sullivan Dinnan, executive director of Health Assistance Intervention Education Network, or HAVEN. But, based on her experience with the confidential health network for medical professionals, she said nurses suffer substance abuse disorders at least at the same rate as the general population. According to a state Department of Public Health roster, 384 of about 62,063 registered nurses with active licenses, or 0.62 percent, have licenses that have been disciplined in the past or currently are suspended, restricted, on probation or facing charges. The roster doesn't specify what led to disciplinary action for those 384 nurses, but of the 266 individuals who have been sanctioned in the past five years, at least 57 percent underwent or are undergoing disciplinary action for a substance abuse-related case. Many of the nurses' records tell a similar story: They diverted a controlled substance — Vicodin, Percocet, Valium, Xanax, diazepam, oxycodone — from a medical center's stock or directly from a patient on one or more occasions and fudged records to cover it up. In one case, a nurse overdosed while on the job. Read more at http://www.theday.com/local/20160312/substance-abuse-nurses-arent-immune. |
ABOUTA selection of stories I wrote as a breaking news and police reporter for The Day in New London, Conn. Archives
July 2019
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