Lake Accident Yields $19 Million Lawsuit

By Andrew Gorosko

The estate of a man who died in a boating accident on Lake Zoar in October 1998, has sued the town, the Lake Zoar Authority, the town’s three Lake Zoar Authority members, and the Connecticut Light & Power Company (CL&P), among 12 others, in seeking $19 million in damages in the man’s death.

In a lawsuit filed in Meriden Superior Court, Arleen S. Altschuler, the executrix of the Estate of Frederic A. Altschuler of Woodbridge, seeks the damages. Mrs Altschuler is the widow of Frederic Altschuler, who died in the boating accident. 

Also named as defendants in the lawsuit are: the towns of Monroe, Oxford, and Southbury, the eight individual members of the Lake Zoar Authority from those towns, and Northeast Generation Service.

CL&P owned Lake Zoar at the time of the accident. Northeast Generation Service bought the lake from CL&P earlier this year under the state’s deregulation of the electric utility industry.

The lawsuit alleges that the Lake Zoar Authority, and the many other defendants, were negligent in various ways, resulting in Mr Altschuler’s accidental death in the boating accident.

While skimming southbound on Lake Zoar mid-day Saturday, October 24, 1998, Mr Altschuler, 57, of 329 Amity Road, Woodbridge, the sole occupant of the speedboat, was ejected from the boat and killed, after he had struck an object submerged in the lake. The accident occurred about 12:11 pm approximately 1,000 feet north of the Jackson Cove boat launch on the Oxford side of the lake.

State police have said Mr Altschuler was making a southbound high-speed run when the boat struck the submerged object and swerved, ejecting Mr Altschuler from it into the lake. Mr Altschuler was piloting a 1991 mid-sized, STV twin-hull, outboard-powered racing boat, according to the state Department of Environmental Protection, which investigated the accident.

Mr Altschuler was rapidly recovered from the water by another boater. The victim was transported by Life Star helicopter to Yale-New Haven Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 1:16 pm, according to the DEP. Mr Altschuler’s body was transported to the chief state medical examiner’s office in Farmington for an autopsy. A spokeswoman for that office said Mr Altschuler died of “cranial cerebral blunt force trauma,” or a severe head injury.

Mr Altschuler was wearing a life vest, crash helmet, and face visor when the accident occurred.

The speed limit on Lake Zoar at that time was 45 miles per hour. In the investigation, the DEP sought to determine the boat’s speed at impact. Investigators found a mostly submerged object floating in the water, which the boat had apparently hit.

 

Allegations

In the 24-page lawsuit, Mr Altschuler’s estate alleges that CL&P and the Lake Zoar Authority, and the individual authority members were willfully negligent in that they failed to remove dangerous debris from the lake that could injure boaters, particularly in the fall season, and that they failed to warn boaters of dangerous conditions in the lake.

The lawsuit alleges that such debris should be intercepted and removed from the lake on a regular basis before it flows downstream to Stevenson Dam. Lake Zoar is an 11-mile long impoundment on the Housatonic River created by the hydroelectric Stevenson Dam.

The lawsuit alleges that when the boat struck a foreign object and/or dangerous debris, the impact broke off a control surface beneath the boat, causing the boat to turn violently to the left and eject Mr Altschuler from the right side of the boat, causing the injuries which resulted in his death.

The defendants have a December 5 return date in the case in Meriden Superior Court.