SAN FRANCISCO– A California U.S. District Court jury has rejected a questionable job offer by the Burlington Northern & Santa Fe Railway Company to an employee who was injured on the job and, instead, awarded him $2,125,000 for the railroad’s failure to provide the employee a safe work environment. The judgment is one of the largest awards ever handed down by a U.S. jury for a non-paralyzing injury of the type suffered by the employee, Ronald Puckett.
“Railroad workers deserve safe working conditions, and the size of this award indicates that the jury agrees with that premise,” said R. Edward Pfiester, of the Pfiester Law Corporation, of Los Angeles. “Mr. Puckett was only 32 years old at the time of the incident. He not only suffered extremely painful, debilitating injuries that will plague him for the rest of his life, but he also lost his ability to earn an adequate living for his wife and six children. We are grateful that the jury saw fit to compensate him justly.”
Ronald Puckett, a U.S. Navy veteran who served in Desert Storm and received the Naval Achievement Award, is a married father of six children, ages 2-15. He was a six-year BNSF employee and locomotive engineer when he reported to duty at the Richmond rail yard in the San Francisco area on the morning of June 13, 2000. At about 10:00 a.m., he was operating a BNSF locomotive that was “shoving” — pushi g ahead of it — a group of railroad cars, commonly called a “cut,” to connect them with another group of cars ahead. Puckett was part of a three-man crew headed up by the yard foreman, an experienced switchman named J.A. Johnson. Johnson was directing Puckett via portable radio, a method that is standard in such operations because the view of the engineer — in this case, Puckett — is blocked by the sheer bulk of the rail cars that the locomotive is pushing. By regulation, the engineer never moves the locomotive without being directed to do so by another cr ew member — in this case, Johnson — whom he relies on to be his eyes and ears.
Long-standing BNSF safety rules also required Johnson either to ride the lead car that was being pushed by the locomotive or to walk alongside it in order to direct the locomotive engineer’s actions precisely. According to trial records, Johnson did not abide by these safety rules; instead, he stood near the switch, attempting to look ahead and guess where the head car was moving. Johnson misjudged the distance between the cars and misguided Puckett. As a direct result, Puckett’s train collided with the parked railcars, causing a violent jolt as the moving train came to a sudden stop. Puckett was hurled out of his seat, and his body was slammed against the metal console, then back onto his buttocks on the steel floor. He suffered serious injuries to his lower back, shoulder, head, neck and left knee.
Puckett retained the Pfiester Law Corporation to file suit against BNSF under the Federal Employers’ Liability Act (FELA), which is the injured railroad employee’s sole remedy for an on-duty injury. Unlike other industrial workers, railroad employees are not covered by state workers’ compensation laws. Under FELA, a railroad has “a nondelegable duty to provide its employees with a reasonably safe work place.” FELA also directs that if the railroad’s negligence played any part, even the slightest, in injuring the employee, then the employee can recover full damages, including past and future medical expenses, past and future loss of earnings, and past and future general damages for physical pain and mental anguish. The Pfiester Law Corporation has more than 25 years’ experience representing injured railroad employees and the public successfully in lawsuits against railroad corporations.
“BNSF is responsible for this crash and Mr. Puckett’s resulting injuries because BNSF failed its duty to provide a reasonably safe place to work,” said Pfiester. “The incident occurred in plain sight of upper BNSF management, yet they did not oversee their operation adequately to prevent an incident that robbed Ronald Puckett of his ability to be employed gainfully for the remaining 30-plus years of his working life.”
In February 2001, Puckett underwent a lumbar fusion with titanium metal cages using bone harvested from his hip bone. A year later, an orthopedic surgeon replaced the anterior cruciate ligament of his left knee with that of a cadaver. All of his injuries except the lumbar spine and left knee have healed since the crash, Puckett’s doctors have precluded him from any repetitive squatting, bending, twisting or walking on uneven ground. They also have limited him to lifting or carrying no more than ten pounds.
Nearly two years after the crash and less than a month before the scheduled trial date, BNSF offered Puckett a position that his doctors have said he is not able physically to perform according to the job’s description. BNSF offered dubious assurances that third parties would perform the required physical activities that he cannot meet because of injuries suffered in the crash. Pfiester said that BNSF refused to permit his firm’s vocational rehabilitation expert to perform a job analysis, the purpose of which is to obtain a detailed job descr ption for the treating doctor to determine if the injured party actually can perform the job’s duties. Pfiester and his client believe that the job was offered in order to make it appear that Puckett was rejecting a legitimate job offer — for a position that, in reality, he could not perform — in order to avoid compensating him for about $1 million in future earnings.
“In the end, the jury rejected the BNSF’s arguments and decided in favor of Ronald Puckett, a man who has lived in pain every day since June 13, 2000, and who much would prefer to support his family by working at the railroad job that he loved,” said Pfiester.
R. Edward Pfiester, Jr. specializes in representing injured individuals with an emphasis on railroad workers. Pfiester is the only California lawyer listed as a “Railroad Law Specialist” in Best Lawyers of America. According to Jury Verdicts Weekly, Inc., he has won more court cases against railroads in the past 25 years than any other California lawyer. He holds the “AV” Martindale Rating, which is the highest rating for legal ability, expertise and ethics by Martindale-Hubbell, the United States’ largest and oldest lawyer rating company.