Articles Posted in Construction Accidents

I read in Syracuse.com yesterday that a 37-year old man, Lateef Haskins, died Friday in a construction accident when he fell from the scaffold he was working from. He was working for a subcontractor on a job renovating the State University College of Oswego.

The article went on to say that Mr. Haskins had shown heroism when, several years ago, he helped rescue a family of four from their house fire. Using a ladder, he had gotten people out of the top floor before the fire department got there. This was not without risk to his own life; flames were shooting out of the roof as he rescued his trapped neighbors.

Mr. Haskins’ family will likely be entitled not only to workers’ compensation benefits, but to much more compensation should they file a claim under New York’s Labor law 240, also known as “The Scaffold Law”. I have blogged about this special Statute often before. Under most circumstances, when a construction worker falls from a scaffold, the general contractor and the owner of the construction project (here, New York State) are automatically liable for all damages suffered by the worker and his family. In this case, that would include all future lost wages and compensation to any children Mr. Haskins’ has for “loss of parental guidance”.

I read in the New York Law Journal today that a coalition of business groups has formed to once again attack Labor Law §240, known as the “Scaffold Law”, and its sister Statute, Labor Law §241. The Scaffold Law has, in my humble opinion as a Central and Syracuse New York construction accident lawyer, saved countless lives in New York by holding employers and owners of construction sites responsible for workers’ falls from scaffolds (among other things). The other Statute, Labor Law §241, provides additional protection, not only from falls, but for many other types of common construction “accidents” (I put “accidents” in quotes because most of them are not true accidents, but rather the result of employers and others encouraging or allowing their workers to cut corners on safety).

The “new” coalition is made up of the usual suspects: The Business Council of the State of New York, the Associated General Contractors of New York State, Unshackle Upstate, and the New York State Builders Association. These guys get together every five years or so to take another whack at our dear Labor Law, so far, thank God, without success! If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try . . .. Well, you know.

According to the article, the new coalition’s leaders believe Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration may be more “business-friendly” than his predecessors’, and that the time is right for delivering a knock-out blow to these safe construction-work statutes. And they may be right! But even if they are “right”, what they are doing is wrong. They are putting profits over safety, and in my book, and I hope in Mr. Cuomo’s, that’s like finger nails on a blackboard.

When I was a college student, I used to paint houses in the summer to make a few bucks. I was fearless then. I would climb way up high on extension ladders and paint the peaks of three-story homes. And I would climb on roofs, lie down and dangle my head over the edge, and paint the eeves. Nothing was holding me to the roof except gravity and guts. I was in my 20’s and I did not think I could ever die, or even get injured. And work was plentiful. Homeowners readily hired me because I had a reputation for doing a good job on the cheap.

Now, much older, wiser, and having represented too many fallen workers in my job as a Central New York and Syracuse construction accident lawyer, I dare not climb a ladder even to clean my own gutters. Being a Central New York construction accident lawyer has its downside – I have lost my nerve. I take six steps up the ladder, my mind’s eye sees three or four clients who fell when the ladder they were on toppled, or when they lost their grip, I then think of how my family will fare without a breadwinner, and before you know it, I have backed my way down the ladder to the safety of mother earth.

My house needs painting. Even though I have painted over 50 houses in the day, I am not going to paint mine. I would much rather represent fallen workers than be one.

Take a drive around Central New York in this nice springtime weather and you’ll probably see workers up on ladders and roofs, repairing roofs, gutters or doing other types of construction work. But you probably don’t look at construction work the same way I do. As a Syracuse New York construction accident lawyer, I see laws being broken! The workers are not breaking the law, but the contractors who hire them and the owners of the buildings they are working on are.

Under New York’s Labor Law and Federal law (OSHA), construction workers working from heights are required to be tied up with a full-body harness attached to a shock-absorbing lanyard or a retractable lifeline. A lanyard or lifeline stops the worker from hitting the ground – instead his fall is arrested on the way down. And because lanyards and lifelines are made to absorb shock, the gravitational forces on the body are minimized. The full-body harness then distributes the remaining gravitational forces of the fall throughout the entire body so as minimize the risk of strain or injury to any part of the body.

The contractor and owner of the building are also supposed to ensure that the ladders workers use to get up to the heights they are working from are tied down, both at the bottom and the top.

My hometown newspaper, the Geneva Finger Lakes Times, reports today that a Florida man working for a subcontractor on the Wal-Mart “Super Center” expansion in the Town of Geneva, New York, fell from a scaffold, suffered shoulder and wrist injuries, and was then Merrcy Flight-flown to Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester. The worker had been working at the ceiling level when he and the scaffold both fell over. OSHA is investigating.

No matter what OSHA decides, though, I can tell you with almost absolute certainty, from my years of handling New York falling scaffold injury cases, that the injured worker has a “slam dunk” New York worksite accident case against the owner of the building where he fell, Wal-Mart, as well as against whoever the general contractor on the job was. This is because of a special New York law, called the “scaffold law” (Labor Law 240[1]), specifically designed to help victims of unsecure scaffolds and ladders get full compensation for their injuries from both the owner of the building and the general contractor on the job. You can read my prior posts on this topic by clicking here and here.