Trench Collapse Leads to $1.12 Million Verdict

There are so many way to injure or kill yourself in the construction injury.  This is the reason why we have a lot of regulations that control what contractors need to do regarding safety of their employees.  For example, there are regulations and safety standards when digging trenches.  Depending on the size of the trench, if there is a collaspe, a worker could be bured alive and either killed or seriously injured.  See the following case for an example:

A 100-pound mound of dirt collapsed onto Plaintiff while he was installing a 12-inch water pipe into a trench. The impact crushed Plaintiff’s left ankle, causing fractures and torn tendons and ligaments. Plaintiff also suffered a lumbar-disc herniation and radiculopathy. Consequently, Plaintiff underwent multiple debridement procedures, physical therapy, epidural injections, a lumbar fusion, a laminectomy and surgical repair of the tendons. According to Plaintiff’s experts, Plaintiff is considered permanently disabled and can no longer perform physical labor. Plaintiff also claims he needs counseling for psychiatric issues associated with the trench collapse, including major depressive disorder.

At the time of the incident, contractor Miniscalco Construction, LLC (Miniscalco) had been hired by Aqua Pennsylvania Inc. (Aqua) to supervise Plaintiff’s work. According to a U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) expert, Aqua discovered that the trench was not in compliance with OSHA regulations, which required shoring to brace the walls of trenches over five feet deep. Aqua ordered Miniscalco to shore the trench wall, which Miniscalco did. Nevertheless, the OSHA expert testified that Miniscalco did not continue to enforce the OSHA regulations to ensure the walls were properly shored and braced thereafter.

Certified Nursing Assistants Vulnerable to Work Injuries

Certified Nursing Assistants (CNA's) who work in nursing homes or special care homes are likely to be injured at work 2.3 times more than all private businesses combined.  This information has been provided by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.  

In my 17 years of representing injured workers in workers compensation cases, CNA's have been one of the most frequent professions that I see.  In my opinion, this stems from the fact that often times they are required to lift heavy patients.  Further, they are not provided with the appropriate training for assisted lifting or the appropriate devices or the appropriate levels of staffing.  Often times, these workers are overworked and underpaid and are basically left on their own to handle way too many patients.

It takes a special kind of person to be a Certified Nursing Assistant working in a nursing home caring for elderly people.  I think they deserve more credit than they get.  They deserve more pay than they receive and they certainly deserve to have a safer working environment.

If you are a CNA and have been injured at work or know of a friend who has been injured at work and you have questions, always feel free to contact me.  

The Deadliest Jobs in America

Click through to see an infographic on the deadliest jobs in America.  Some of surprising findings (all in year 2010)....

--219 workers died in Pennsylvania due to work related incidents.

--39% of work related deaths are transportation related.

--8% were women, 92% involved men.

--65 years and older workers are twice as likely to die at work than any other age group.

--8 million worksites, 133 million workers, only 2,200 OSHA inspectors.

--Most construction fatalities are caused by falls.

In Pennsylvania steel town, fatal gas explosion goes unpunished by OSHA

4,690 people were killed at work in 2010, up three percent from 2009, the Center for Public Integrity reports. That means that more Americans died in their workplaces in one year than died during the entire war in Iraq.


Many on-the-job deaths were met with only a small fine, an average of $7,900. Some workplaces were never inspected at all. And because of understaffed regulation offices — and the looming threat of further budget cuts — the numbers aren’t likely to change.  The Federal regulatory agency tasks to investigate and enforce job-safety regulations, OSHA, is poorly staffed and underfunded.  And Republicans want to cut the agency's funding even more.

It would take the perpetually short-staffed OSHA 130 years to inspect every workplace in the U.S. Managers and their underlings must strike a balance between meeting “performance goals” set in Washington and conducting comprehensive inspections when deaths occur. A target of 42,250 inspections nationwide was established for fiscal year 2012, up 5.6 percent from the previous year’s goal. The number of federal inspectors, meanwhile, has stayed mostly flat; there were 1,118 in February 2012.

As this article details, sometimes when someone is killed in a preventable work injury, not much is done.  

Nick Revetta’s death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail.  “These deaths take place behind closed doors,” says Michael Silverstein, recently retired head of Washington State’s workplace safety agency. “They occur one or two at a time, on private property. There’s an invisibility element.”

Here's a nice video about this story.  Very sad....

OSHA investigating Sullivan County gas worker fatality

As per the Towanda Daily Review:

The Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA) is investigating the death of a worker who suffered a traumatic injury on Jan. 14 at a Chesapeake Appalachia gas well site in Sullivan County.

The Chesapeake Appalachia gas well site where the traumatic injury occurred on Jan. 14, 2011 is located on Elsroy Hill Road in Fox Township in Sullivan County. The worker who was injured on Jan. 14 at Chesapeake Appalachia's Fox Township site was transported by helicopter to Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, and he later died, Sullivan County Coroner Wendy Hastings confirmed.

He was pronounced dead by Montour County Coroner Scott Lynn, she said.

Hastings said she did not know the name of the worker who died.

A preliminary report from first responders at the scene was that the worker had suffered a traumatic head injury.

Chesapeake Energy has referred questions about the incident at the Fox Township site to Patterson-UTI Drilling Co., which is the company that the worker who died was working for. Patterson-UTI Drilling Co. was a contractor hired by Chesapeake Appalachia to work at the gas well site in Fox Township, according to Brian Grove, senior director for corporate development for Chesapeake Energy.

Patterson-UTI Drilling Co. has refused to provide any information to The Daily Review about the worker's death, saying in a written statement that Patterson-UTI Drilling "does not comment on confidential personnel matters involving individual employees."

In a separate section of the same article, the Review reported that Nomac drilling was fined $7,000.00 for safety violations related to a gas worker fatality in 2010 in Towanda Township. This amount of a fine does not seem like enough of a "sting" to Nomac's bottom line in order for them to change their practices. But it's at least something. In many, many instances, employers are not fined at all by OSHA, who is an overworked and under-funded agency.

OSHA not doing its job

OSHA has come under significant criticism in a report from the Department of Labor’s inspector general for inadequately enforcing safety laws against high risk employers. As you may know, OSHA is the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and they are tasked with enforcing the country’s safety and health laws as it relates to employers and the conditions under which employees work.

You can see more information about this report at Workers’ Comp Insider here. You can also see a copy of the report here.

Specifically, the report indicated that OSHA did not take the appropriate enforcement action in 29 sample cases-and those employers subsequently experienced 20 fatalities, of which 14 deaths shared similar violations. This basically means that it is quite possible that if OSHA did its job then at least 14 people might still be alive today.

Under Bush, OSHA Mired in Inaction

Why does this not surprise me. From WashingtonPost.com:

In early 2001, an epidemiologist at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration sought to publish a special bulletin warning dental technicians that they could be exposed to dangerous beryllium alloys while grinding fillings. Health studies showed that even a single day's exposure at the agency's permitted level could lead to incurable lung disease.

After the bulletin was drafted, political appointees at the agency gave a copy to a lobbying firm hired by the country's principal beryllium manufacturer, according to internal OSHA documents. The epidemiologist, Peter Infante, incorporated what he considered reasonable changes requested by the company and won approval from key directorates, but he bristled when the private firm complained again.

"In my 24 years at the Agency, I have never experienced such indecision and delay," Infante wrote in an e-mail to the agency's director of standards in March 2002. Eventually, top OSHA officials decided, over what Infante described in an e-mail to his boss as opposition from "the entire OSHA staff working on beryllium issues," to publish the bulletin with a footnote challenging a key recommendation the firm opposed.

Current and former career officials at OSHA say that such sagas were a recurrent feature during the Bush administration, as political appointees ordered the withdrawal of dozens of workplace health regulations, slow-rolled others, and altered the reach of its warnings and rules in response to industry pressure.

The result is a legacy of unregulation common to several health-protection agencies under Bush: From 2001 to the end of 2007, OSHA officials issued 86 percent fewer rules or regulations termed economically significant by the Office of Management and Budget than their counterparts did during a similar period in President Bill Clinton's tenure, according to White House lists.

Deadliest job in America: Working on cell phone towers

According to a story in this week's RCR Wireless News (no online link yet), building and climbing towers (which can be hundreds of feet tall) is more dangerous than ranching, fishing, logging, and even ironworking. The fatality rate is currently 183.6 deaths per 100,000 workers: Five tower workers died during one 12-day span earlier this year alone. 18 tower workers died on the job in 2006.

The cause for the runup in tower worker deaths isn't completely clear, but it's likely a combination of careless working practices (workers not using safety gear 100 percent of the time, or not using it correctly) and network operators pushing to build out and upgrade their networks too quickly. Hard to blame carriers for wanting to get faster networks up and running, but not at the cost of human life. (RCR is careful to note that the investigation into the rise in fatalities is too early to attribute to any specific source.)

Oddly, a loophole in OSHA rules may make it difficult for changes to happen quickly: Towers are often constructed by small contractors instead of the carriers or the owners of the towers. Since the carrier isn't on site during the construction of the tower, the contractor receives the fine and the carrier and owner face no sanctions. (That hasn't stopped the families of some of the deceased workers from suing carriers, though.)

Up next: Workers and their unions are hoping to push through federal legislation which could lead to more thorough regulations covering safety in this largely ignored industry.

America’s Surprisingly Unhealthy Jobs

Forget stuntmen. Some of the country’s least healthy jobs are in cubicles, hospitals, and restaurants. Are you at risk?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), it’s not just farm laborers or police officers who have high rates of some common – and seemingly benign – professions have high rates of injury and illnesses that were severe enough of work in 2006.

Danger in Some Workplaces

The following professions are among the highest in terms of injuries and illnesses, listed in descending order ---BLS (in parentheses).

Construction Worker (125,120)
“Falls and problems from repeated hammering are the biggest problems,” says Garrett Brown, an industrial hygienist ….Administration.

Office/Administrative Staff (83,320)
The biggest risk is repetitive strain injuries from typing, as well as illnesses from inhaling toxic printing inks and other ….

Sales Staff (76,210)
These jobs may seem innocent, but Brown says salespeople fall from ladders while gathering merchandise, strain their repetitive strain from typing reports, and even suffer injuries from malfunctioning displays.

Nursing Aides, Orderlies, and Attendants (49,480)
These workers can be exposed to everything from toxic chemical in hospitals and nursing homes to strains from lifting

Janitors and Housekeepers (46,540)
The heavy carts many housekeepers push can injure their backs and potent cleaning supplies can cause illnesses,

Registered Nurses (20,500)
Lifting heavy patients, getting hit by gurneys, or attacked by family members can cause injuries.

Waiters (9,520)
“Those heavy trays don’t carry themselves,” says Dr. Davis Liu, author of “Stay Healthy, Live Longer, Spend Wisely…Healthcare System.” He continues, “Everything is super-sized, and waiters are carrying 5-10 pound trays repeatedly in hand.”

Computer Specialists (2,720)
“The ergonomic problem her is not only typing, but also workplace design,” says Brown. “Sometimes they squeeze”

What You Can Do

Experts offer four simple suggestions for preventing illness and injury that apply to most professions.

1. Work it out.

Even if you sit at a desk all day, treat yourself like an athlete, suggests Liu.

“When you get overuse injuries, your body is saying, ‘If you want me to do this, you’ve got to make me really strong…hurting.”

Work with a physical therapist, get regular exercise, and work on strengthening the muscles you job uses most.

2. Take breaks.

A lot of injuries result from not stretching or relaxing. Set a timer to go off every hour and take a break. Stretch shoulders…by you work, suggests Liu. Then do deep breathing to de-stress before returning to work.

3. Double up.

If your work requires protective gear, keep spares with you always. Store extra gloves, goggles, and other supplies ….

4. Follow your office’s safety program. “If it doesn’t have one, report your employer to OSHA (Occupational Safety). No one should sit on their hands and hope for the best. Even though it can be difficult financially, say …no to your boss.

The Working Wounded: A New York Times Editorial

From The New York Times:

Mr. Elias wanted his workers to clean out a 25,000-gallon tank that contained cyanide waste. He refused to test the air or the waste inside the tank. He ignored the pleas of his workers for safety equipment. When the workers complained of sore throats and difficulty breathing, Mr. Elias told them to finish the job or find work somewhere else.

Mr. Dominguez, a 20-year-old high school graduate, wanted to keep his job. Wearing just jeans and a T-shirt, he used a ladder to descend into the tank. Two hours later, covered in sludge and barely breathing, he was removed from the tank, a victim of cyanide poisoning at the hands of a ruthless employer who would blame his “stupid and lazy” employees for the incident. Mr. Dominguez suffered severe and permanent brain damage. He now has the rigid body movement and stammering speech found in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

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Mr. Elias did not commit a crime under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which is the primary federal worker-safety law in the United States. Why not? Because Mr. Dominguez did not die.

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Employers rarely face criminal prosecution under the worker-safety laws. In the 38 years since Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act, only 68 criminal cases have been prosecuted, or less than two per year, with defendants serving a total of just 42 months in jail. During that same time, approximately 341,000 people have died at work, according to data compiled from the National Safety Council and the Bureau of Labor Statistics by the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

It is long past time for Congress to change the law. First, Congress should amend the Occupational Safety and Health Act to make it a crime for an employer to commit violations that cause serious injury to workers or that knowingly place workers at risk of death or serious injury. Whether good fortune intervenes and prevents harm to workers should not determine whether an employer commits a crime.

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