I blogged just the other day about the Syracuse construction workers, employed by Apple Roofing, who were injured when a scaffold collapsed, bringing them down with it, at Binghamton University dormitory under construction. I talked about how New York’s special “Scaffold Law” (Labor Law 240) makes the Owner of the…
Scaffolding has only one purpose: To hold workers up safely while they work. And when it doesn’t do that, very bad things happen. I’m talking big injuries, or even death. That’s why, for generations, New York State has recognized the importance of having an iron-tight law to protect construction workers…
Construction season is in high gear again, and that, of course, means more construction accidents. Yesterday the Syracuse Post Standard reported that a construction worker fell into a 12-foot hole, which was to be the foundation for a new single-family home, on a construction site job on Seymour Street. The…
I was pleased to read in the Geneva Finger Lakes Times today that a regional representative of OSHA (federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration), Jennifer Lawless, speaking at Geneva’s Ramada Inn, announced that, under the Obama administration, OSHA is stepping up compliance enforcement in the Syracuse and Central New York…
The Geneva Finger Lakes Times reports today that a construction worker fell 12 feet through an unfinished stairway of a house under construction in Yates County, New York yesterday, and landed on the gravel basement floor below. The worker, of Geneva, was brought by Mercy Flight to Strong Memorial Hospital…
From our perspective as lawyers representing Central New York’s injured construction workers in lawsuits against employers and construction site owners, it seems that there are a whole lot of OSHA scaffold, ladder and height-work violations in Syracuse and the surrounding areas. Every year without fail we file new lawsuits on…
The U.S. Department of Occupational Safety and Health Administration, commonly known as “OSHA”, has released its “Top 10 Most Frequently Cited” violations for 2009. This list not only exposes the most frequently violated safety regulations in 2009, but also, in my experience, represents a pretty accurate list of the top…
New York’s Labor Law section 240 is a special New York statute aimed at compensating construction workers, and their families, who are injured or killed when they fall or when objects fall on them during construction work (and in some other circumstances as well). This law allows all New York…
Several injured construction workers have walked into my office this year in Auburn, Cayuga County, New York, as they do every year, with a typical central New York construction-site injury story that goes something like this: “Mr. Bersani, I fell from a ladder and suffered bad injuries while I was…
In a recent post, I wrote about a multi-million dollar settlement Michaels Bersani Kalabanka recently achieved for a Syracuse area victim of occupational lung disease. I attached to that post a video-clip about one of the most common types of occupational lung disease, silicosis, an incurable, potentially deadly, and progressive…