The Gloversville Leader Herald reports that a construction worker died September 11 while doing work on an addition to the Fage USA yogurt company’s plant at the Johnstown Industrial Park, which is located between Albany and Syracuse.
Johnstown Police Chief Mark Gifford told the Leader Herald that the worker was on a platform doing electrical work early during the morning of September 11 when he came into contact with a live electrical wire.
Police, fire and emergency personnel were called to the scene to respond to the “industrial accident.” The worker was pronounced dead at Nathan Littauer Hospital in Gloversville.
According to the Leader Herald, the man worked for a subcontractor performing work on the Fage USA facility, which is located on Opportunity Drive in the industrial park.
The Leader Herald did not name the subcontractor. An investigation into the tragic incident is ongoing.
The addition project started in November 2012 and will include a parking lot, silos and a whey pretreatment plant, the newspaper reports. Work on a roughly 39,000-square-foot addition to the Proliant Dairy, which would run a pipe from the Fage USA facility, is set to begin in May, the newspaper states.
OSHA: Electrocution Accidents are Part of the ‘Focus Four’
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) lists electrocution among its “Focus Four,” or the four leading construction site hazards. The other hazards on the list are falls, struck by object and caught-in or caught-between accidents.
In an effort to raise awareness among supervisors and workers about these hazards and reduce accident-related injuries and deaths, OSHA has issued a variety of educational and prevention materials that can be found on its website.
According to OSHA’s most recent statistics, 66 workers in the U.S. died from electrocution in 2012, representing 8.1 percent of all fatal construction accidents.
Owners and Contractors Can Be Held Liable for NY Construction Site Accidents
New York Law recognizes the dangers that construction workers face as well as the need to protect their rights and the rights of the families of workers who are injured or killed on the job.
In New York, the owners and contractors at a construction site can be held liable for worker injuries and deaths. They cannot escape liability simply because a worker was employed by a subcontractor doing work at the site.
These laws can be highly complex. This is why it is important for injured construction workers or surviving family members of deceased workers to seek assistance from a skilled New York construction accident attorney.
For example, Powers & Santola, LLP, has decades of combined legal experience handling these types of workplace accident claims.
Attorney Daniel R. Santola has actually written a book that is widely used by other lawyers in this area of the law, Litigating Construction Accident Claims in New York. The book combines legal analysis, practice instruction and guidance and sample litigation forms covering New York’s Labor Law Sections 200, 240(1), 241(6) and 241-a.
To learn more about construction accident claims in New York, please feel free to contact Powers & Santola by calling our firm or submitting our online form.
