Welder Wins $947,285 Verdict After Fall From Unsecured Vancouver Scaffold
Won by D'Amore Law Group.
A Clark County jury found scaffolding contractor Safway Services 65 percent at fault after welder Charles Pamplin fell from an unsecured 11-foot scaffold at a Vancouver oil-rig fabrication yard.
What happened
Parker Drilling Company was building oil rigs at a fabrication site in Vancouver, Washington, and hired Safway Services to put up and take down the scaffolds that welders used on the structures. On December 14, 2010, a Safway crew started one of those scaffolds and built it to about 11 feet before Parker pulled the workers off to other tasks. The platform was only two feet wide at the base. It was never secured to the oil-rig structure, a violation of Washington's scaffold safety rules. The crew left for the day without finishing the platform and without tagging it as off limits.
Charles Pamplin, a welder from Louisiana, came in that evening for the night shift. He and a coworker saw a short access ladder and a green tag on the scaffold, the signal that a platform is cleared for use, and no red barricade tape. They started welding around 6:30 p.m., reaching the work mostly by man-lift. After his midnight lunch break, Pamplin climbed the partial ladder to grab a jacket he had left up top. The scaffold tipped over and he fell, shattering his left foot and heel.
Pamplin sued Safway along with the project contractors. His attorney, Tom D'Amore of D'Amore Law Group, told the Clark County jury the fall was preventable: a platform two feet wide, eleven feet tall, and tied to nothing was going to topple the moment someone put weight on it. Engineering testimony backed the point, showing the scaffold's height-to-base ratio left it unstable by design. Safway countered that some unknown third party must have swapped the warning tags and removed the barricade tape, and it asked the trial judge to instruct jurors on "superseding cause," a theory that would have shifted blame to whoever altered the signals.
After a seven-day trial, jurors deliberated only a few hours. They put total damages at $947,285 and assigned 35 percent of the fault to Pamplin and 65 percent to Safway. The comparative-fault split cut his recovery to a net judgment of $615,735.25.
Safway appealed, arguing that Pamplin never proved its work caused the fall and that the judge wrongly refused the superseding-cause instruction. In April 2017, Division I of the Washington Court of Appeals rejected both arguments. The court held there was enough evidence that Safway's negligent construction of the scaffold caused the injury, and that the tag-tampering theory did not fit the legal test for a superseding cause. The judgment was affirmed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from D'Amore Law Group
All D'Amore Law Group proven verdicts →A federal jury in Pendleton held two trucking companies and their drivers responsible for a 90-mile road-rage chase that ended in a fatal head-on crash, returning a $26.5 million verdict that survived the defendants' appeal intact.
A Multnomah County jury found a property management company and a private security firm liable after one of the firm's unlicensed armed guards shot and killed Freddy Nelson Jr. in a Lowe's parking lot, returning $21.25 million to his family.
An arbitration panel ordered Safeco to pay more than $1.2 million to Canby teenager Connor Zieg after a driver with a .285 blood alcohol level fell asleep, drove onto the sidewalk, and ran him over, though a policy cap held his actual recovery to $500,000.
A Wasco County jury found Mid-Columbia Medical Center negligent for keeping anesthesiologist Frederick Field on staff despite years of complaints, awarding $950,000 including punitive damages to a patient he assaulted while she was sedated.
Related workplace injury verdicts
After nearly 30 years of litigation, Markovits Stock and DeMarco secured a $742 million-plus-interest settlement for approximately 23,000 Navistar retirees whose healthcare and life insurance benefits had been repeatedly reduced.
Paul Napoli served as court-appointed co-liaison counsel for nearly 10,000 firefighters, police officers, and construction workers who developed respiratory diseases after working at Ground Zero, securing a settlement worth up to $712.5 million against the city and its contractors.
Jose Valdivia, 25, was building scaffolding at the Phillips 66 refinery in Lake Charles when a co-worker above him lost his grip on a steel scaffold bar. It struck him on the head and spine through a hard hat and full protective equipment. He is in a wheelchair with limited speech. Brock never reported the accident to OSHA.
On September 7, 2019, Ulysses Cruz, a 48-year-old United Airlines ramp worker serving as a wing walker at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, was struck from behind by an Allied Aviation Fueling Company of Houston van whose driver said the morning sun was in his eyes. Cruz was paralyzed from the chest down and suffered a stroke two days later that cost him the use of his dominant right arm. After a two-week trial before Judge Ravi Sandill, a Harris County jury on October 25, 2021 found Allied 70 percent and driver Reginald Willis 30 percent at fault and awarded Cruz, his wife and their two children $352.7 million in compensatory damages. Judge Sandill conditioned denial of a new trial on a $117.5 million remittitur of noneconomic damages, which the family accepted, and an amended judgment of about $235.3 million was signed February 7, 2022. Allied appealed, the parties reached a confidential mediated settlement, and on July 18, 2023 the First Court of Appeals vacated the judgment and dismissed the case at the parties' joint request.