Hidden Live Wires in a Power Pedestal Bring Electrician Jon Valaer an $8.4 Million Denver Verdict

Q3 Contracting is a national contractor that connects electrical service for Xcel Energy across nine states. At a Colorado mobile home park, the company wired a power pedestal, one of the ground-level boxes that feed electricity to the homes. Three live wires were left hidden inside that pedestal. The hazard sat there, energized and out of sight, for about five months.

Jon Valaer, an electrician, came to work on the same pedestal. When he made contact with it, the concealed wires shocked him. The jolt itself was brief. What followed was not. Valaer developed complex regional pain syndrome, known as CRPS, a chronic nerve condition that produces constant, out-of-proportion pain in an affected limb, can make the limb hard to use, and tends not to resolve on its own. For Valaer, an electrician whose work depends on his hands, that was the core of the harm.

The shock happened in 2018. The case took about three years to reach trial. Valaer hired Kurt Zaner of Zaner Law, and in 2021 the matter went to a jury in Denver District Court for a trial that ran roughly two weeks. The defense did not concede much. Q3 brought in an electrical shock scientist from Minnesota who told jurors the contact was a 120-volt shock lasting roughly a tenth of a second, far too short and too weak, in his telling, to cause any lasting harm. The company also argued comparative fault: it said Valaer should have worn insulating gloves and tested the pedestal for power before he touched it.

Zaner's team had to do two things at once. First, tie a fraction-of-a-second shock to a permanent, painful nerve disorder. Second, put a number on a lifetime of care. The damages the jury accepted broke down into $3 million in economic losses for past and future medical care, $1 million in noneconomic damages, and $4.4 million for physical impairment, a category Colorado does not cap. Because Colorado does cap noneconomic damages, the judge afterward reduced that $1 million piece to the statutory limit of about $614,000, while accrued interest pushed the final judgment past $10 million.

The jury returned $8.4 million. On Q3's comparative fault argument, the panel assigned zero percent of the blame to Valaer, rejecting the claim that his own conduct had contributed to the injury.