Understanding human injuries and the environment to determine if and how an injury occurred, and how it could have been prevented.
What were the causes for this accident?
A question frequently asked is whether an injury did or could not have occurred in the manner described. Dr. Strauss performs injury causation analysis and has investigated and analyzed injuries in 40 states; on a Navy base and on a barge, in factories and in a steel mill, on farms, highways, construction sites and rail yards. The environment differs but the common element is that a person was injured or lost their life, and the questions to be answered are how and why?
Emergency physician record.
When a person is injured the physician is interested in treating the injury, not the details of how it occurred. On the other hand, the accident reconstructionist or engineer is trained in physics, motion and objects, not people. With the combination of his engineering, medical, human factors and accident reconstruction education, training, research, knowledge and experience, Dr. Strauss can understand and synthesize all the data in order to best understand the conditions and perform an accident and injury analysis.
Analyzing and reconstructing an accident.
Depending on the circumstances, Dr. Strauss will examine equipment CAD drawings as well as X-ray and MRI images. He will measure vehicle wheelbase and tibia bone length. He will calculate the stopping distance of a vehicle, the reach of a backhoe, or the running speed of an eight year old male child. Some injury analysis problems require information that does not exist, so Dr. Strauss has conducted tests to determine the acceleration of concrete mixer trucks, the air turbulence generated by a passing utility vehicle, the friction coefficient between pallets and the floor of a semi-trailer, the rolling ability of plastic pylons and the ability of humans to estimate distance and speed of vehicles.
Dr. Strauss' ability to look at the human and injury in a quantitative manner, and explain his work and findings in a clear fashion allows him to excel in accident reconstruction and injury analysis.