Bridge tender avoids prison, pleads guilty in deal approved by family of the late Carol Wright
THE BRIDGE TENDER controlling the Royal Park Bridge drawbridge when a woman walking across fell to her death last year will avoid prison after a judge approved a plea deal today Jan. 10.Artissua Paulk of Greenacres will serve 18 months of house arrest and eight years of probation after pleading guilty to second manslaughter in the death of Carol Wright of West Palm Beach.
Paulk, who originally pleaded not guilty last year, also will write a letter of apology to each of Wright’s two sisters and complete 200 hours of community service under the deal approved by Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Scott Suskauer.
Paulk and her supervisor were fired by FDI last year. A civil lawsuit filed by Wright’s family against Florida Drawbridges Inc. was settled last summer, with the company agreeing to pay $8.3 million and enact a series of reforms.
Read Joe Capozzi's article
15 comments:
Cara and Katie should be interested in this article.
You get what you pay for. In order to get responsible people to operate the heavy equipment of a bridge the agencies are going to have to up the salaries. Who wants to make less than a Wawa employee with the possibility of being charged with manslaughter? 8.3 million to the family of an old Hag who was where she shouldn't have even been when the bridge went up? Ridiculous.
"old hag"
kinda curious at what age does a woman become an "old hag," anonymous. Carol was 79. Maybe 70? What do you think?
@5:21, I think it depends. Certainly by 70 a woman is old and most could be considered "hags." But it could happen earlier if a woman doesn't know how to take care of herself.
@3:50
It takes no brains to operate a bridge...it is by definition a low income job for people that are not smart enough to hold good jobs...or not ambitious enough to work harder.People like yourself pushing for higher wages for imbeciles will drive Artificial Intelligence to replace low paid humans.
Beyond this, the woman killed by extreme negligence was a cyclist that was likely far more athletic than you...
@6:51...ARE WE JUST TALKING ABOUT WOMEN HERE or do men also fit into this OLD fart category?
Most women I know take care of themselves.
Biden, on the other hand, can't help his dementia.
Then we have Trump who is sharp as a tack.
Age is relative.
Most seniors feel and act a lot younger... I do. :)
Age does not make a woman a Hag....
Being a disgusting person like Whooppie and her group on "the View"...aka.. "The Hags of Hate" , is the substance of being a hag.
All things to think about when crossing a bridge, or train tracks.
Dan,how many years have you been a bridge tender? What an ignorant comment on your part.Show me where you got your asinine definition of bridge tending. Traditionally , retired professionals (police ,pilots, medical ,teachers,etc) became bridge tenders because no younger person could survive on the abysmally low wages and it did not require too much physical labor. (Just mental ,Dan, which would exclude you from the job). Even suggesting that AI could safely perform the job that bridge tenders perform countless times a day further exposes your extreme lack of knowledge on this subject.
Anon@9:41
I had a friend that used to cycle with us on the fast pack rides on A1A...while he was studying to become a neuromuscular massage therapist he took the easiest, most do NOTHING job he could find...so that he could study most of the time he was getting paid..mostly to do nothing. He used to tell us about how ridiculous the job was....That was Ken Ruiz.
Ken supplied me with my definition of Bridge Tending.
Clearly you know nothing about software programming or AI...IN Fact, it would be easy to take the many sensor and visual cue inputs and have an AI system constantly updating itself on radar images of vessels approaching in the size range that may need the bridge to open, and constantly approximating the time it would take for them to reach the waiting point near the bridge...The AI could easily generate positional and intent based Radio Requests, using it's human speech engine, with simple answers demanded..not unlike Comcast and it's tech support phone bots we all hate so much--- but this would be much more effective, and could be mostly yes or no type differentiation that AI excels with.
A WAGO PLC system could easily handle the "control" data and feedback response actions. We use something like this for our engines.
As to me, considering I run a team of Engineers and Physicists that are building a second generation prototype engine that utilizes hydrodynamic cavitation to collapse bubbles and produce plasma ..to be followed by Proton to proton collisions..ie., fusion...and we have huge companies lining up to "buy-in"..I don't think I will worry myself over your assertions about what I can accomplish mentally.
Meanwhile, the real CRIME in this thread was the assertion that the woman killed was a "hag". The anonymous coward that called her this is the one that needs to be ripped to pieces on this blog. Essentially HATE SPEECH, there was no excuse for it, and this woman did nothing wrong...she was killed by a negligent woman with no morals and no cares for anyone but herself. That tender deserves to rot in prison for life.
lynn it is sad when you let this garbage on YOUR BLOG'this is the problem today people think the freedom of speech gives them the right to talk like idiots what i have read this lady was in better health than most 40 year olds.get away from your computer and walk the bridge.hope you never have to hang on as long as this lady did
@8:09...your free speech is noted.
Regarding AI being better than imbeciles and the entirely "self-involved" at safely controlling the Bridge Tending...Adding a requirement for all vessels that would like to have the bridge raised for their passage, to have an AIS tracking system to low the AI to have an even better awareness mechanism for vessels it should address..would be wise.
Cameras on the bridge should identify all moving targets( pedestrian, pet, bike, car, etc), it should track them, use If Statements in programming to set system responses for each target identified. In the case of an unidentified target- cameras could send an emergency video feed to a supervising human at a main office far away. They could either determine/identify the target and issue, or, they could call 911 for an emergency human traffic intervention or a clearing of the warning status.
The DOT actually has budgets for this type of Bridge improvement, and replacing. 90% of the Bridge Tenders in Florida with AI systems would save the state millions in dollars and like save lives as well.
Technology seems to fall into two categories: the technology that we like, because we find it useful or fun, and the technology that we hate, for at least as many reasons.
The key here is bringing people up to speed with technology, and this is where we seem to be having difficulty.
People are born with different skill sets. Some people are a whiz at technology but would have difficulty reading the manual of operation.
I don't know where 8:47 falls in the hierarchy of skills, but his grammar could use work. Maybe he is relying too much on technology for sentence structure and punctuation.
@11:53...petty comments...you continue to look for negatives and I see nothing wrong with the grammar. This blog is not about typing into a section and editing mistakes or whatever. It's to get your message across. It's not a lesson in commas, etc. Everyone gets the essence of the post. Debate the message. How about using your real name other than anonymous to maintain credibility.
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