Articles Posted in Construction Accidents

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 disease. Silicosis is caused by the inhalation of silica, which is found naturally in sand and many rocks, and which, when blasted or sanded, becomes airborne. Silicosis and other work-related lung diseases are all too common in Syracuse, Auburn, Buffalo and other aging industrial cities.

Today the Clarion Ledger (a Mississippi Newspaper) reports that a victim of silicosis was awarded 7.6 million dollars in the first silicosis case to go to a jury in Mississippi. The injured worker developed silicosis from 25 years of sandblasting without proper protection from the dangerous dust that engulfed him on a daily basis.

So what did the defendant, Mississippi Valley Silica Co., do wrong? Apparently just about everything. The jury heard substantial proof that the company knew that the abrasive-blasting of sand without proper protection was likely to cause silicosis. They knew, or should have known, that proper protection would not have been complicated or costly. Yet they did nothing or next to nothing about it.

Michaels Bersani Kalabanka recently negotiated a large (several million-dollar) settlement for a Central New York worker who suffered an occupational lung disease. This is the second multi-million dollar settlement we have had with occupational lung disease cases. Most occupational lung diseases lead to difficulty breathing, and sometimes to death.

In this Syracuse area work injury case, the worker was a mason whose job included cutting through bricks and mortar with a powered high-speed demolition saw and grinding the mortar from between the bricks with a powered hand-grinder. Of course he knew this created a lot of dust (he would go home every day covered in the stuff), but what he did not know was that there were harmful particles in the brick dust that were slowing scarring and damaging his lungs. He ended up with a serious lung disease called “mixed dust Pneumoconiosis”.

I once heard it said that if you can’t breathe, nothing else matters. Any one of the millions of Americans who suffers from asthma can attest to that.