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Alexander v. Demmer Corporation8/20/2002
er subjects an employee to a continuously operative dangerous condition that it knows will cause injury, yet refrains from informing the employee about the dangerous condition so that (s)he is unable to take steps to keep from being injured, a fact finder may conclude that the employer had knowledge that an injury is certain to occur. [Travis, supra at 178.]
Plaintiff presented sufficient evidence to create a question of fact whether that is the case here. Plaintiff presented evidence that Demmer's supervisors subjected her to a continuously operative dangerous condition, i.e., hand cleaning the pinch rolls without the protection of Lockout, without adequate training to either plaintiff's supervisor or to plaintiff, knowing that would cause injury based on the R-1062's record of past injuries, yet did not inform plaintiff about the dangerous condition or provide her with proper training, thus she was unable to understand the danger and take steps to avoid being injured.
This case is similar to Golec, supra, in that plaintiff presented evidence that raised a genuine issue of fact whether McKenna and Collins had actual knowledge that Demmer's failure to adopt and enforce Lockout would lead to certain injury , and knew that untrained employees without knowledge of Lockout or of adequate procedures to clean the pinch rollers could be exposed to unexpected start ups of the rollers. Unlike in Travis, supra, in which the press double-cycled so slowly that employees could avoid injury, the two Demmer employees that were injured before plaintiff on the R-1062 specifically, suffered serious injuries, including lost fingers. In Travis, before the plaintiff's injury, the defendant's employees had escaped injury when the press had double-cycled. Unlike in Travis, the conditions that led to plaintiff's January 1998 accident in the instant case had been present since at least July 1995, when MIOSHA cited
Demmer for violating Lockout regulations after Williams' workplace injuries on the R-1062. The instant case is stronger than Golec in the sense that the plaintiff in Golec received some instruction in loading the furnace, while plaintiff in the instant case was merely told to observe Garcia clean the rollers, and Garcia herself had not been adequately trained and was improperly and unsafely cleaning the rollers, i.e., hand cleaning the rollers with a rag and having her crew clean both the leveling and pinch rollers simultaneously, and operating the R-1062 switch that controlled the start-up and direction of the rollers. See n 10, supra.
Under the circumstances that plaintiff had been given no training in how to safely clean the pinch rollers, and that plaintiff was assigned to help clean the R-1062 pinch rollers at a time when defendant's managers knew that Lockout was neither implemented or enforced; that plaintiff was told to "observe" how it was done and did observe Garcia hand-cleaning the pinch rollers with rags, while both sets of rollers were being cleaned simultaneously, and while the R- 1062 was being operated without Lockout; and under the circumstances that Garcia herself was inadequately trained; plaintiff was not warned that the rollers were not locked-out and that jogging the rollers would expose her to unexpected start-ups of the rollers, and that the rollers did not rotate only in reverse while being cleaned, we conclude that sufficient facts were alleged that plaintiff was exposed to a continually operative dangerous condition.
V.
Regarding whether defendant "willfully disregarded" actual knowledge that injury was certain to occur, defendant argues that Demmer "willfully disregarded nothing," and points to precautions it purportedly establis
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