Responsibility

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hawkeye23

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We read on this forum more then once about a person who puts someone indanger of a electrical hazard that can or does corse injury to a person has to be held personaly responsabiliy for injury. Is this a fact or is this wishfull thinking of some people. I have looked in 70e and cannot find anything on this.
if someone knows if this can befound in 70e or Osha would you post the infomation
thank you.
 
hawkeye23 said:
We read on this forum more then once about a person who puts someone indanger of a electrical hazard that can or does corse injury to a person has to be held personaly responsabiliy for injury. Is this a fact or is this wishfull thinking of some people. I have looked in 70e and cannot find anything on this.
if someone knows if this can befound in 70e or Osha would you post the infomation
thank you.
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You do anything that can endanger someone else and you are setting yourself up for a potential lawsuit if someone is ever injured or killed over it. Only thing that NEC, 70e, or OSHA will do for you is help verify if you followed acceptable standards that they may have information about.

Kind of like driving faster than posted speed limit, you may not be directly at fault if involved in an accident, but if you were driving too fast, you possibly still may be considered to have complicated things at the very least.

Remember the case of hot coffee being spilled on a customers lap and scalding them at a McDonald's restaurant a few years back? Same customer likely would have complained the coffee wasn't hot enough if it had been a little cooler:slaphead:

Everyone has risk of lawsuit by just living in today's society. You even run into people that are afraid to help someone that has been injured, because of past lawsuits to people that thought they were doing a good deed:thumbsdown:
 
Three things protect you:
if you showed a duty of care,
if you showed due diligence,
and if you acted like a reasonable person knowing what you knew at the time (the reasonable person standard). Reasonable people do not have to be right, they just have to have acted 'reasonably'. The Europeans don't do this reasonable thing - I don't know how they judge these matters.
 
G._S._Ohm said:
Three things protect you:
if you showed a duty of care,
if you showed due diligence,
and if you acted like a reasonable person knowing what you knew at the time (the reasonable person standard). Reasonable people do not have to be right, they just have to have acted 'reasonably'. The Europeans don't do this reasonable thing - I don't know how they judge these matters.
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Those things protect you from a judgement against you, hopefully, but are not a guarantee that you will not be taken to court.
 
hawkeye23 said:
I have looked in 70e and cannot find anything on this.
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NFPA70E is not a law. It is not truly a 'thou shalt' nor a 'it must be this done way' instruction manual.

It is simply a industry standard for creating an Electrica Safw Work Practices program. But, as an recognized industry standard, if an event occurs, you might be asked to justify why you chose not to follow it.
 
In OSHA's eye's, the EMPLOYER is liable for the safety of their employee's. This falls under the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act (5)(a)(1).

In a civil proceeding, the attorney is going to go after whom ever has the largest pocket book, and that again, will most likely always be the employeer, unless is was gross negligence.
 
WorkSafe said:
In OSHA's eye's, the EMPLOYER is liable for the safety of their employee's. This falls under the General Duty Clause of the OSH Act (5)(a)(1).

In a civil proceeding, the attorney is going to go after whom ever has the largest pocket book, and that again, will most likely always be the employeer, unless is was gross negligence.
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Customer too!
 
kwired said:
Those things protect you from a judgement against you, hopefully, but are not a guarantee that you will not be taken to court.
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Yes.
Virtually all of the lawyers and judges I ran into were crooks or incompetent, and one was a pedophile who never served one day as a 'guest of the state'.
 
realolman said:
Speculation. .... Overruled

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants
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It is speculation, and not acceptable for the court, but doesn't mean people can not have their own opinions.

I maybe don't have much of a problem with filing a suit over being burned, and wanting compensation for medical expenses I do have a problem with the claim that there were $2.7 million in punitive damages being claimed, that was 1994, today it would have easily been at least double that amount.

I don't want this thread to turn into a discussion of that case, just want to point out that people are willing to get "easy money" by blaming others for just about anything, this makes liability a big issue for everyone, and even more so if you were paid to provide goods or services. Even if you win a liability issue, they will drag you through the mud in the process, so you may win the war but still will lose some of the battles.
 
kwired said:
It is speculation, and not acceptable for the court, but doesn't mean people can not have their own opinions.

I maybe don't have much of a problem with filing a suit over being burned, and wanting compensation for medical expenses I do have a problem with the claim that there were $2.7 million in punitive damages being claimed, that was 1994, today it would have easily been at least double that amount.
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If you read further into that case, you'll see that all she wanted was $20,000 to cover medical expenses and lost wages. McDonalds countered with $800 to settle. If you see the pictures of what happened to her, I think you'll realize that $20,000 was more than reasonable and $800 was literally spitting in her face.
 
As many of you know, I'm from UK.
The majority of our business is with customers in the industrial sector.
Safety is taken seriously by both us and our customers. We, as individuals, routinely have to update our safety credentials on a regular basis. Many sites will not permit access unless you have an accredited site safety passport. Risk assessments and method statements for the tasks to be undertaken usually need to be submitted in advance.

The body that mostly governs this is the HSE, the Health and Safety Executive.
For many, it is seen as an overbearing authority that comes down like a ton of bricks on anything that could be remotely construed as posing a risk however remote.

The law is simple. You have a duty of care to others be they fellow employees, customers, visitors, or the public. And yourself.
The wording includes the phrase "as far is reasonably practicable".
That allows interpretation.
I've had to sit through courses on HSE legislation and a couple examples of "reasonably practicable" come to mind.

On a London hotel construction site one of the contractors had a fork lift truck. The driver went for a break. A worker from another company wanted to get up to some scaffolding and, despite not being authorised to operate the fork lift truck, did so to get where he wanted to be. He subsequently fell and suffered injury. It may seem to run a bit contrary to common sense but the contractor that had the fork lift truck was found guilty rather than the unauthorised user. The keys had been left in the truck. It would have been "reasonably practicable" to have removed them.

The other relates to an old building. A company had taken it over as offices with a room that stored archives and accessed through a rather low doorway. Someone bashed their head on the lintel. And tried to make a case of it. Given that it was an old building it was ruled not "reasonably practicable" to have done so.

Somewhat related.
My sister ran a pub that was in a listed building. It was built a bit over 500 years ago. Listed means that alterations are not permitted. The upstairs rooms have low ceilings and even lower doorways.
"Duck or grouse" is above one of them.

My point is that the "reasonably practicable" clause in entirely sensible.
Take every reasonable precaution that you can and you ought to be safe from error by omission.
 
BattleCat said:
If you read further into that case, you'll see that all she wanted was $20,000 to cover medical expenses and lost wages. McDonalds countered with $800 to settle. If you see the pictures of what happened to her, I think you'll realize that $20,000 was more than reasonable and $800 was literally spitting in her face.
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So does that mean spitting in her face was the basis for $2.7 million in punitive damages? The woman likely did want just medical compensation, and other reasonable damages, her attorney likely saw an opportunity and wanted all he could get.

Like I said I really don't want to dwell on that particular case, I just wanted to point out that liability for anything you do can easily turn into a huge lawsuit whether you think someone did right or wrong.
 
kwired said:
So does that mean spitting in her face was the basis for $2.7 million in punitive damages?
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Who chose that number and for what reasons?

The woman likely did want just medical compensation, and other reasonable damages, her attorney likely saw an opportunity and wanted all he could get.
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Untrue. Again, they went to McD's for $20,000, they were spit on, kicked in the face with a counter of $800.
 
BattleCat said:
If you read further into that case, you'll see that all she wanted was $20,000 to cover medical expenses and lost wages. McDonalds countered with $800 to settle. If you see the pictures of what happened to her, I think you'll realize that $20,000 was more than reasonable and $800 was literally spitting in her face.
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And if you look into it further the manager reported the coffee maker with the defective thermostat not once but twice and was threatened with firing if he stopped selling coffee.
 
Well, let's carry this to an extreme ... pick any lawbook or legal dictionary, and look up the definition of "manslaughter." Better yet, "involuntary manslaughter."

It's pretty simple. You did something. Someone died. You didn't mean for that to happen but it did. Oops. Hope you have a nice cellmate.

That's just one of the hundreds of laws, and doctrines, that are used to hold people accountable. It's not the place for 70E to reinvent our legal system.
 
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