Welder Wins $947,285 Verdict After Fall From Unsecured Vancouver Scaffold

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.