A Utah high court ruling last week that a Chevron refinery employee suffering neurological damage after a plant accident can sue her employer will not weaken the exclusive remedy provision in the state's workers' compensation law, an attorney said.
But the decision by the Utah State Supreme Court does clarify when the exclusive remedy provision in the Workers' Compensation Act barring lawsuits does not apply, said the attorney, Shandor Badaruddin.
Mr. Badaruddin's firm–Moriarty, Badaruddin & Booke in Salt Lake City–represented Jenna R. Heff, who sued after alleging that the company was guilty of willful misconduct for sending her into a sludge pit that emitted poisonous gas.
The court found that based on the facts in her complaint, Ms. Helf suffered an injury that was intentional and thus exempted by the law, which makes the comp system the exclusive remedy for workplace injuries that are accidental or the product of negligence.
As a result of the ruling, the discovery process prior to a trial can begin, according to Mr. Badaruddin. Ms. Helf, who was injured in 1999, suffered seizures, headaches, eye irritation, a twitching eyelid, nausea, vomiting, lethargy, weakness of extremities, disorientation and mucous membrane irritation.
Mr. Badaruddin said the court ruling did not change the law, but clarified when the exclusive remedy does and does not exist. The wide application, he said, is that negligence attorneys will now know better when a worker suffers an injury if it justifies a lawsuit against the employer.
The court's standard for this, he said, is still very high, and proving knowledge and expectation that harm will occur "is as difficult an element of proof as you can imagine."
According to Ms. Helf's complaint, she was injured attempting to use a neutralization process on spent caustic sludge from a tank at the refinery. In the past Chevron had taken tanks with sludge away from the refinery for cleaning in a process which cost $40,000.
When she arrived at the plant for the night shift, Ms. Helf was not told that an effort to neutralize sludge had already sickened several workers who were sent home, according to the decision. Ms. Helf alleges she was not told she needed a respirator, and in the course of the neutralization effort she passed out, and stopped the process when she came to.
The plant was cited by the Safety Division of the Utah Labor Commission as a result, according to the opinion.
Facts argued by Ms. Helf suggest that "when her supervisors directed her to reinitiate the neutralization process, they knew or expected that she would be injured by the resulting noxious gases. Therefore the intentional injury exception to the Act applies," the court found.
The vote on the ruling was 4-1. But while Justice Michael Wilkens agreed that the facts qualified for a lawsuit, he wrote that Ms. Helf had forfeited her right to sue because she had accepted medical costs and $7,880 in temporary total disability payments from the comp system.
Calls to Chevron and the firm's attorney in the case, E. Scott Savage, were not immediately returned.
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