Fall is coming, the air is cooling, and fall fun is in that air.

Just be sure your fall fun doesn’t lead to a fall — or other accident — involving an all terrain vehicle.

Small ATVs such as Yamaha Rhino ATVs are not road-worthy — in fact, they’re illegal to drive on Texas streets and highways. Rather, they are meant for off-road recreation. The trouble is, thousands of ATV users are having so much “recreation” that it’s maiming or killing them.

High-profile victims have included rocker Ozzy Osbourne, who broke six ribs, his collarbone and a vertebra in his neck in a 2003 ATV accident, and sax player LeRoi Moore of the Dave Matthews Band, who died two months after an ATV accident last June.

(more…)

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Beyond fantasy characters such as the Fantastic Four’s Human Torch, no American is impervious to flame, and all face burn injury threats from fires. But only a small percentage of Americans face such threats with one crucial added concern: a handicap that makes them mobility-impaired.

Such was the case for a Houston woman last week when her high-rise apartment building had a fire alarm. The woman, who’s partly paralyzed, was told via alarm that she had to evacuate the building while using stairs, not an elevator. But she knew she couldn’t do that in a motorized wheelchair from her 25th floor residence in Greenway Condominiums.

Fortunately, she entered a hallway where she found a valiant neighbor who carried her down the stairs all the way to the building’s lobby. And fortunately, the fire was confined to a clothes dryer and was quickly extinguished. (more…)

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