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ACCIDENTS AND FALLS IN NC WORKERS' COMP
What is an Accident in North Carolina Workers' Compensation Law?
All injuries are not covered under the Workers' (workmen's) Compensation Act. An injury must result from an accident. An accident, according to workers' compensation law in NC, is a separate event that occurs before the injury and causes it. The event's place and time needs to be able to be determined. An accident can be determined by an interruption in the work routine or the introduction of unusual conditions likely to result in unexpected consequences. An injury is not an accident under the definition of the NC Workers' Compensation Act if it occurred under normal work conditions and the employee was performing his job duties in the usual manner. If unusual conditions become apparent in the course of employment, an accident is more likely to have occurred. Such unusual conditions may include: an employee who is doing someone else's job for a short period of time, or an employee who has not yet learned his job and is injured despite the lack of any unusual event having occurred.
The Back Injury Exception to the North Carolina Workers' Compensation Act
Back injuries are not easily supported by the occurrence of an accident. For this reason, the North Carolina legislature amended the Workers' (workmens') Comp Act to create an exception for back injuries. Under NC workers' compensation law, back injuries that arise out of and in the course of employment and are the direct result of a "specific traumatic incident" of the work are an injury by accident, so long as the back injury arises out of and is causally related to the traumatic incident. A "specific traumatic incident" does not have to involve unusual conditions or an interruption from the worker's normal routine; the incident just has to have occurred during a fixed, recognizable time period. Back injuries that occur gradually over long periods of time do not qualify as "specific traumatic incidents." The existence of pain need not arise simultaneously with the "specific traumatic incident" that caused the back injury. Even without the immediate onset of pain, if there has been a "specific traumatic incident," a compensable injury by accident occurs under workers' compensation law in North Carolina when a worker suffers a disabling physical injury to the back that is casually related to the incident.
The NC Workers' Comp Act and Heart-related Problems on the job
Damage to heart tissue that is clearly precipitated or caused by "overexertion" constitutes an injury by accident. However, death caused by heart disease is ordinarily not an injury by accident. Additionally, suffering a heart attack is not a compensable injury by accident when performing one's usual job duties in the usual way. A worker must show that the heart attack was precipitated by an extra-ordinary or unusual exertion.
Injury Suffered by a Fall: Compensability under the NC Workers' Comp Act
A fall itself is usually considered a compensable accident under the NC Workers' (workmen's) Compensation Act. North Carolina has adopted the unexplained-fall rule. Under this rule, a claim should be compensable when an employee suffers injuries from a fall if there is no evidence that the fall arose from a cause independent of employment. When a fall is the incident leading to injury, an unusual event does not have to be shown since the fall is by itself a compensable accident. However, if the injury suffered by a fall is only attributable to an employee's idiopathic condition and no factors attributable to employment intervene or contribute to cause the injury, an employee's workers' comp. claim is not compensable. If an injury by fall is partly attributable to any risk of employment, a claim should be compensable, even if the employee suffered from a pre-existing idiopathic condition that may have contributed to the injury. No affirmative evidence as to what caused the fall is necessary to support a finding of an accident by fall.
NC and the Workers' Comp Rule that an Employee's Actions cannot Bar a Claim
An employer may not say that an employee suffered an accident because of his own reckless actions. Contributory negligence of an employee is not a defense to workers; compensation liability. Even if the employee acted with gross negligence, a workers' comp claim will not be barred.
Fights and Assaults and the Workers' Compensation Act in North Carolina
An employee can recover under the NC workers' comp law if assaulted over an argument concerning work. North Carolina recognizes that disagreements may arise from time to time when people work together and that it is reasonable to foresee that fights may occur between employees. However, fights that occur between employees because the employees do not like each other or for some reason not related to employment are not allowed. If these fights were covered by workers' compensation law, an employer would have to fire an employee in order to avoid possible liability resulting from these fights.
Injuries Due to the Exposure to Weather under NC Workers' Compensation Law
In North Carolina, a rule has been made that an employee who is injured because of exposure to certain weather hazards will be covered under the Workers' Comp Act. The job has to expose an employee to conditions greater than those which he would be exposed without that job. Some injuries that could result from certain weather conditions of employment include heat exhaustion, sunstroke and hypothermia (freezing).
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