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Flanner v. Tulsa Public Schools2/12/2002
. v. Burns, is no longer available for establishing an injury's causal nexus to the hazards of employment.
The 1986 amendment of § 3(7) [now § 3(10)], which requires the source of a compensable injury to be work-related, - i.e., to be one that does not stem from a purely personal risk - plainly contravenes this court's teachings of yore in Fox. Claimants can no longer rely on the positional-risk theory. Its re-adoption today would allow plainly ordinary ambient risks to be combined with idiopathic falls for creating an accident's compensability. The law now demands that the risk responsible for a claimant's injury be causally connected to the work being performed. If the risk stems from neutral or personal sources, their presence must exceed the ordinary forces of hazards to which the general public is exposed. Whether Flanner, when injured, was working near the offending coffee maker is of no consequence. What makes a difference is the absence of forces within the perimeter of her fall which operated to increase the severity of harm from the fall she sustained.
VI. SUMMARY
An idiopathic fall at an employee's workplace is not compensable unless it be shown that work-generated risks in interplay with the internally (and spontaneously) induced fall elevated the danger of exposure to harm. The burden was on this claimant to show that danger-increasing forces were unleashed by the presence of the coffee maker in the perimeter of Flanner's fall. No such showing has been attempted. In this case scenario the coffee maker posed no more than an ordinary hazard of claimant's job milieu -perhaps an opportunity of including exposure to thermal harm. This falls short of elevating the severity of injury from the impact of the fall. There is hence no competent evidence to support compensability based on heightened dangers from work-connected risks at the locus in quo.
The court's reliance on Larson's aberrational abridgement of an employer's immunity from liability for idiopathic falls to include all falls onto familiar workplace objects is inconsistent with Oklahoma's explicit statutory mandate that calls for exclusion from compensability of "personal risks."
I cannot countenance today's adoption of a distorted definition for enhanced workplace risks. The court's return to the teachings of Fox jurisprudence will allow every injury by fall occasioned by a spontaneous internal systemic failure to become compensable, thus effectively scuttling the statutory standards. The latter require an injury to arise out of claimant's employment and stem from non-personal risk sources.
There is here no record support for the court's conclusion that the trial judge erred in refusing to allow recovery. I would sustain her order denying compensation.
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