Iowa Judicial Branch Building
DES MOINES, Iowa - Co-workers of a man who was smothered in a lime-processing machine can’t be held liable for his death because they didn’t know a safety gate was poorly fastened, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled.
Iowa law carves out an exception from the workers’ compensation scheme, which otherwise bars lawsuits against employers, to allow claims against co-workers for gross negligence, the court noted. But to meet that bar, plaintiffs must prove they had actual knowledge of the risk that caused a fellow employee harm.
“It is theoretically and factually impossible for an employee to `consciously fail to avoid’ a peril if the employee did not actually know of it,” the court ruled in a Feb. 6 opinion by Justice Thomas D. Waterman.
Michael Griffith was killed at a Wendling Quarries mine in 2020 after he fell into a lime surge hopper used to store and process powdered limestone. A later investigation found the gate on a catwalk surrounding the hopper had been secured with wire, not standard retaining pins.
Griffith’s widow and father sued co-employee Travis Galloway, as well as John Kulper, Wendling’s director of safety, and Wendling president Anthony Manatt for negligence. After an eight-day trial in 2023, the jury awarded the plaintiffs $2.8 million, which an appeals court upheld.
Trial testimony revealed Wendling had used the lime surge hopper for decades without an accident, and the last time an employee had fallen in was in 1996, before the safety rails were installed. Galloway testified he examined the bin in the headlights of his truck the day of Griffith’s accident, but didn’t climb onto the machine. Kulper, the director of safety, and Manatt weren’t present at the quarry that day.
The trial judge dismissed claims against Manatt but allowed the case to proceed against Kulper and Galloway. The judge instructed the jury they could find gross negligence if the employees knew of a risk that could cause probable injury and did nothing to avoid it. The jury handed down $2.6 million in damages to Griffith’s widow and $200,000 to his father.
An appeals court affirmed the verdict, ruling that the missing safety pins, absent supervisors and “a mere pre-dawn visual inspection by headlights” made injury probable. That was error, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled, since the facts of the case make it clear neither of the defendants had actual knowledge of the risk.
Iowa, like other states, passed workers’ compensation as a “grand bargain” largely eliminating the right to sue over workplace injuries in exchange for guaranteed payments from an industry fund. The only way to get more money is to prove co-workers deliberately exposed an employee to probable risk of harm.
“Kulper and Galloway testified that they did not know the pins were missing and did not know the gate was unsecured. Their testimony was unrebutted,” the court ruled.
In a previous case, the Iowa court rejected claims against a plant manager who didn’t know safety equipment had been removed from a machine, even though the injured employee’s immediate boss did. The court did allow a lawsuit over a fatal accident where a supervisor ordered employees to use a lift device from the back of a pickup, instead of the ground with safety legs extended, in high wind.
“A jury could easily find that his cursory inspection was negligent, but without proof that Galloway actually knew of the missing pins, the gross negligence claim against him fails,” the court concluded. “Kulper was not present at the Garrison quarry on the day of the accident, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that he knew of the missing pins or unsecured gate.”
Pickens, Barnes & Abernathy argued for the defendants, while the John C. Wagner Law Offices represented the plaintiffs.
