On March 21, 2005, a Local 80 journeyman had just finished nailing off roof sheeting on a new home at a Toll Brothers’ Hawthorn Woods project. As he began to step down from the roof ridge, one of his feet slid out from under him and then the other. He continued to slide down the roof. His body struck a properly constructed and secured toe board that had been nailed into the roof sheeting and to the roof trusses by a member of his crew.
Despite the proper securement of the toe board to the roof, the carpenter’s descent from approximately the middle of the roof to the toe board caused the toe board to fail and he fell from the roof’s edge. As a result of his fall, he sustained very serious injuries to his leg, resulting in approximately five surgeries and his loss of trade as a journeyman carpenter in Illinois.
Daniel Streckert, a GWC Injury Lawyers partner covering Illinois construction injury cases, and GWC attorney Christopher Hughes related the carpenter’s story to an OSHA expert to make a determination as to whether or not there was a basis for a claim against the general contractor, Toll Brothers.
Although OSHA did not require carpenters to be tied off on the roof, there was the basis for a claim against Toll Brothers’ for failure to enforce the “interim toe board/slide guard standards” for the size of the roof relative to the pitch of the roof.
The personal injury law firm in Chicago IL – GWC Injury Lawyers – was able to successfully mediate this Illinois construction accident case with the defendant, Toll Brothers, and a safety consultant. The settlement was for $2 Million Dollars to the Plaintiff along with the waiver of a workers’ compensation subrogation lien in excess of $800,000 by his employer Arbuthnot Construction.
