Construction sites can be dangerous and pose serious health threats to workers if they don’t take proper precautions, pay attention, and focus on safety throughout their tasks and day. Everyone is required to wear safety gear, especially on their heads. Additionally, anyone driving commercial vehicles, or operating heavy machinery, requires extensive training, knowledge, and skill (as well as a commercial driver’s license, otherwise known as a CDL). One second of negligence can be the difference between an average workday, and what could quickly become a traumatic brain injury.
It’s painfully easy to get injured on a job site and even easier to have that injury happen to your head and brain. A strong enough hit, regardless of wearing a hardhat (a regulated task), can impart a concussion, or the next step up, a traumatic brain injury. Listed below are common ays of sustaining a TBI at a commercial worksite/construction site:
- Not wearing protective gear / a hard hat: This is pretty simple – protect your head.
- Unauthorized access: If there were signs, or instructions, to stay out of an area, you shouldn’t have been in there if you were injured.
- Negligent commercial vehicle driving: This can include distracted driving, inexperienced drivers, overweight loads, speeding, and more.
- Negligent construction vehicle operation: Say a still-green operator is working the crane today and swings the load a little too quickly and it hits someone in the head. Regardless of wearing a helmet or hard hat, it’s going to impart some damage that may last forever.
- Slip and fall accidents: An unsafe surface means that workers can slip and hit their heads against concrete, brick, metal, or other hard surfaces to net a TBI.
- Carbon monoxide poisoning: The chances are unlikely, but not impossible to inhale enough carbon monoxide to do lasting damage to the brain on a worksite.
- Falling objects: Depending on the item (tools, debris, etc.) and from how high it’s falling (the higher it comes from, the longer it has to reach a fast speed to wreak havoc) can spell disaster for whoever happens to be under it at that unfortunate moment.
Determining liability in any of these instances takes expert legal knowledge from a Denver personal injury attorney. The construction company could be held liable if they didn’t place appropriate warning signs to bar entry, or to denote dangerous flooring. The contractor could be held liable for putting an untrained driver behind the wheel of a commercial vehicle.
If you, or a loved one, have been injured with a TBI while working in a construction site, contact our offices now to discuss the events so we can determine the next steps and determine what financial compensation you may be entitled to due to the negligence of a third party.