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Woodbury v. CH2M Hill

Facts of Accident:

A Portland, Oregon jury on June 25, 1998, awarded $11.5 million dollars to a recent college graduate who became a complete C-6 quadriplegic after falling 11 feet to an underground walkway at a Superfund remediation site in Troutdale, Oregon. Max Woodbury was hired as a temporary service employee by a husband-and-wife excavation sub-contractor with no experience working at heights. Defendant CH2M Hill was prime contractor on the project. CH2M Hill is a 7,000 employee environmental consulting and engineering firm with a national consulting practice and numbers the United States government and many private firms among its clients. Woodbury's claims at trial were that CH2M had agreed to provide overall supervision and coordination of safety on the job-site, yet its employees had little knowledge of the Oregon fall protection safety rules applicable to construction projects. CH2M Hill provided no fall protection training and failed to require fall protection for Mr. Woodbury while he was assembling and disassembling a work platform above the underground corridor. Mr. Woodbury fell while removing a sheet of plywood from the platform during disassembly. CH2M contended at trial that Woodbury was responsible for his own safety, that he took an unnecessary risk in reaching for the plywood to remove it, and that he probably would not have worn fall protection had it been provided. The jury found CH2M Hill 100% negligent, with no comparative negligence attributed to Mr. Woodbury. The verdict is the largest compensatory damage award to date in an Oregon work injury case.

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