It is a high honor when a defense lawyer calls and says they want to settle your case first and for a premium to get you out of the case. That is exactly what happened after Justin Hill deposed the two defendant drivers in this case. He got them both to admit they could have avoided the crash.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. In Hill Law Firm we handle more bus crash cases than probably most law firms in the state of Texas. We've handled bus crash cases against some of the largest busing companies in the world.

One such example is a case involving a international bus line that takes people from Texas into Mexico. One day while this bus was making one of its routes south, as it was approaching a disabled 18-wheeler on the shoulder, it failed to get over into the left-hand lane to pass it. At about the same time, that 18-wheeler driver who was working for one of the largest companies in the world, was trying to get a speed up to get back into the slow lane so he could get on his way.

He had his hazards on and the bus driver thought he had stopped. As can be expected, the bus driver failed to get over and he ended up hitting the large 18-wheeler truck. This caused the bus to roll over in the median. Our client, an elderly woman, was thrown from her seat into the luggage compartment where she was stuck. She had a broken arm and a broken shoulder.

She was not found until the wrecker was there fixing to tip the bus back onto its wheels. Only then did somebody hear her cry for help. In the depositions for this case, I was able to establish with both of the drivers. The first, the bus driver would have been able to get over completely to the left and avoid this accident had he tried. He also said he would have been able to come to a complete stop if he had started to slow when he saw the truck.

In the same vein, the trucking company driver stated that he could have waited on the shoulder until the bus passed, and then it wasn't a lot of traffic, and then he would have been fine waiting and getting on the roadway after. Both of the defendants called us early on and settled our claims first. In the end, some of the other lawyers had to take their case all the way to trial. It wasn't that we got a low settlement.

We got an early settlement because we were the law firm doing the hard work. We had hired the accident reconstructionists, we had the expertise and knew what we were doing. Because of that, the defendants knew that we would either improve the value of all the cases, or they could resolve our claim first, get us out, and then deal with lawyers that did not have as much experience in bus cases.

We continue to handle bus cases and currently have one bus case in San Antonio, Texas at this time. It's something we're passionate about and it's something we think the industry needs to better regulate. If you have any questions about a bus case, you know how to reach us.

A retired couple was traumatically injured when their front left drive tire suffered a catastrophic tire tread separation while driving at highway speeds in West Texas. This case involved very complex issues of accident reconstruction and engineering.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real. These are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin: I was very lucky as a young lawyer to get a job with one of the best plaintiff's personal injury and commercial litigation law firms in the United States. I cold-called him coming out of law school hoping for the best. That was a non-traditional path. I didn't follow an application out, and send a resume in, and wait three weeks. I went after the job I wanted. One reason I wanted that job was because I wanted to do products liability work.

I wanted to be able to represent people who were injured due to the dangerous design and defect of products. A lot of people understand this as cases based on things like the Ford/Firestone recall, or Ford rollovers, or other vehicle defects. One of the most famous examples is asbestos or lawn darts. There are certain products that are dangerous, and they're unreasonably dangerous for what their intended purpose is.

Luckily, at my first job, I got to work on some of those cases. One of them involved an older couple who had retired. They had decided they were going to buy an RV. They were going to travel around. They were going to enjoy their golden years.

While they were coming back from a trip to Colorado, they suffered what's called a tire delamination, a tire detread. These are defects in tires. When a tire doesn't fully cook or cure together, the tire can fall apart. This is different than a blowout. This is different than all the treads you see on the road. Usually, that is tread associated with retreaded tires.

Passenger vehicle tires are not retreaded, and they should not fall apart. The same is to be said for RV tires. The RV tires in the front aren't allowed to be retreaded. They have to be new tires, and they should not fall apart. In our case, our clients were driving highway speeds when the front left tire delaminated. What this meant is that their vehicle pulled hard left.

Based on the accident reconstruction, it pulled left, it went left and it was not moving. Unfortunately, for our clients, in the area where there was not much other than wheat fields, they hit head on a concrete box culvert. Both of the passengers were critically injured, lower leg injuries, and just a series of injuries, and complications related to their traumatic injuries.

A couple of things happen after that. We sued the tire maker for making a defective tire. This was one of the largest tire makers in the world, and they gave us the runaround. This tire was made overseas because they had reached capacity in the United States. They forced us to go overseas to Italy to depose factory workers.

On top of that, the way these cases are typically defended is an accident reconstructionist hired by the tire company will say something along the lines of, “Yes, even if that did happen, these are controllable events.” They usually say, “You take your foot off the gas and you let your vehicle slow down, while you try to maintain speed.” There's testing showing that that is not necessarily true and that there are uncontrollable events following tire delaminations.

Sometimes loved ones call looking for lawyers for their parents or family members. In this case, a daughter called seeking counsel for her parents. The negligent driver was very underinsured so claims against his insurance broker had to be fully explored before resolving this crash case.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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When I was a young lawyer, I remember a defense lawyer referring to one of my colleagues as a pioneer. He said they were an early settler. He said it as a joke, making fun of them, saying that they settle early and they settle for too low amounts of money. I knew at that time I was never going to be that kind of lawyer and we've never had the reputation of doing anything other than working our cases hard aggressively and getting the best outcome.

About five years ago, I was hired by an elderly couple who were probably in their 80s. I was contacted by their daughter. Their daughter was trying to find the right lawyer for her parents. Not only because of the facts of the case but because of who they were. They were plainspoken country folks and she wanted somebody who could talk to them and they would trust.

I went and met with them. I ended up on a four-wheeler with her 80-year-old father. In that case, they were hit by a man who is seriously underinsured. He lived in a very large house. He had a lot of expensive cars, but right after this crash, he had filed for bankruptcy. He had an insurance policy, but it was just too low. Then we started checking other boxes. Sometimes you can hold an insurance agent responsible if they don't fully explain and/or provide the policy coverages needed by their insured.

In this example, if the man had a lot of assets and money, but the insurance agent didn't tell him he needed more in coverage, he possibly could have had a claim against his own agent. We checked all these boxes and ran down all these paths for these very nice people. In the end though, due to the bankruptcy and a few other things, we were only able to recover the amounts of insurance the negligent driver carried.

It was not an insignificant amount, but the next thing the insurance company wanted to do was settle with one of our clients, but not the other. Luckily, my clients listened to me and trusted me. I told them we need to stick together. At mediation, the insurance company brought forward adjusters, which was the first I'd seen that, even though this wasn't a high-risk case in the bigger picture. In the end, they offered two-full-policy limits for both of these people.

The clients were very happy. The daughter keeps in touch with me and I've kept in touch with how her parents are doing. At Hill Law Firm, our clients are not our clients just for the case. Our clients are part of our family and we stay in touch with them as long as we can.

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When a young boy knocked over a gas can, a nearby pilot light ignited the fumes and caused an explosion. A toddler died and two people suffered serious injuries. This case was handled all the way through the bankruptcy courts to a resolution.

Transcript:

Speaker: Welcome to Hill Law Firm cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day to day basis. Product makers in America are required to make their products so that they're not unreasonably dangerous and defective for their intended use. Generally that means you design against any sort of dangers.

When you manufacture, you make sure that it's up to specs and not dangerous and if you can't get rid of it, then you weren't against any dangers. A few years ago I represented a family who lost one of their children, a young toddler. Now this young little man was out in the garage while his dad was trimming the hedges by hand, not six feet away. At some point, this little kid and his brother picked up the gas can, and because it was heavy and they were both less than the age of five, it tipped over and when it tipped over, the gas ran and it pooled in the garage.

A water heater nearby turned on, ignited the gas, and the vapors went back into the gas can and the gas can exploded. In the end the father, the older son were both badly burned and the youngest son was burned so bad that he did not survive. We took their case and we represented them against the water heater manufacturer as well as the gas can maker. What the water heater manufacturer and the gas can maker both knew was that they both made products that were unsafe.

The water heater manufacturer knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor around the open pilot light that it could ignite fumes from things such as gasoline or other chemical products that are often stored in garages in or around water heaters. On top of that, the gas can manufacturers knew that if they didn't put a flame arrestor in the spout of their gas can, vapors could migrate and those vapors could get ignited. That flame could go back into the can and explode the entire gas can.

They knew that because early on in some of the depositions before insurance companies got involved, the owner of the company admitted that he had been planning to do that and that he knew the cost was very low. He had quoted the cost and he said it was about a quarter per gas can. 25 cents per gas can to save countless lives. Hundreds if not thousands of people were burned or killed as a result of these exploding gas cans, and the numbers have to be similar for the water heater manufacturers that knew they also had a product that was going to end up burning or killing people.

We represented this family against the gas can manufacturer as well as the water heater manufacturer. The water heater manufacturers settled early. While they never admitted wrongdoing, we had all the trade papers showing they knew that they had a problem and they needed to fix it. As it relates to the gas can manufacturer, they settled as well, because our testing showed that in 50 tests with a flame arrestor and 50 tests without a flame arrestor, the flame arrestor worked 100% of the time.

In the 50 tests with the flame arrestor not once did the migration cause the can to explode. This was one of the toughest cases we ever worked on emotionally and from a legal engineering standpoint, it was very tough from an emotional standpoint, just due to the loss the family had suffered. Luckily for that family and the other families that stood up to these manufacturers,...

A young man was over served at one of the largest sports bar franchises in America. The servers had been trained to upsell patrons to larger volumes of alcohol. In this case, the server did just that and the patron became intoxicated.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real world cases handled by Justin Hill in the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: We handle more drunk driving cases in San Antonio than probably any firm our size. Due to our relationship with Mothers Against Drunk Driving and history in handling cases involving drunk drivers, we get referred a lot of cases by their attorneys, and we get hired by a lot of people who are interviewing lawyers to help them in a drunk driving case.

Oftentimes, drunk driving cases have multiple angles. One involves the drunk themselves and the claim against them. Sometimes there are also claims against bars. Generally, Texas law states that bars can be held responsible if they overserve someone and that person goes out and hurts somebody else.

This reminds me of a case we handled in South Texas on behalf of a fireman. This fireman was off duty and was riding motorcycles with his friends. As he was passing a gas station, a young man pulled directly in front of him pulling into the gas station. The firefighter was unable to stop and ended up losing his leg.

In this case, we found out that this young man had been drinking at one of the largest sports bars in America. After we dug into it, we realized this was his 21st birthday. He won an experienced drinker. When he would order a beer, the server would encourage him for only $0.25 more to double the size of the beer. This young man did not understand his tolerance or how much alcohol he was consuming. On top of that, at some point he was so intoxicated he probably didn't even know what he was doing. Now, this large corporation was happy to upsell these drinks because the profit margin is so good and they knew they'd make more money.

This case proceeded all the way to trial. The defendants tried to argue that our client was at fault. They tried to argue that the young man who hit him wasn't that drunk. It was only a little bit more than double the legal limit. In trial, they must have realized that they were probably wrong because while the jury was out, they made us a settlement offer that my client accepted.

What we learned in that case was multiple things, but one is that even these multinational bar and restaurant groups give their servers almost verbatim scripts on how to upsell alcohol. It's not enough that they're serving alcohol. They want you to drink more alcohol, and they want to make more money. That's something we've learned that we've been able to use in other cases in the future.

Now this crashing the settlement, and the result was never going to bring our client his leg back, and he was never going to be the same. At the end of this, the important part was that he felt as though he was taken care of, and he felt that the result we got him was a good result. He also felt that justice had been served, and that that business was not going to do business the same anymore.

Scaffolding is a common sight at construction locations. Improper construction or use of scaffolding can lead to serious injuries or deaths. Hill Law Firm has handled scaffolding related injury cases in San Antonio. On this episode, we talk about how violations of OSHA scaffolding regulations are one of the most common reasons OSHA cites employers.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: In this series, we've been talking about the most common causes of OSHA violations in worksite injuries and deaths. We get called from a lot of injured workers and their families, and we always have to sit down and talk to them regarding what happened on the job, what the employer should have been doing, what the employee should have been doing in some circumstances. One of the questions we always ask is, did OSHA investigate? OSHA doesn't investigate every incident, but they investigate a lot of them.

In those investigations, they'll determine whether or not the employer did what they were supposed to in following OSHA regulations. If they find that the employer did not follow OSHA regulations, oftentimes, they'll fine them or, in some way, sanction them. After they finish their investigations, oftentimes, we're able to get a copy of their full investigative report. Oftentimes, that'll include witness statements, interviews, pictures, and their conclusions of what the employer did wrong.

We've been talking about what the most commonly cited violations are for OSHA violations in these investigations, and the number three most commonly cited regards the general safety requirements regarding scaffolding. The discussion around scaffolding typically is that it should be designed by a qualified person, constructed in accordance with the design, and loaded and in accordance with a good design.

Employers are bound to protect construction workers and other workers from falls and falling objects while they're working at, near, or on scaffolding at heights of 10 feet or higher. We all know what scaffolding is. It's that framework of what looks like a metal skeleton with pieces of wood plank going up the side of the building, and maybe, people are using it to paint or construct a new structure. Due to the heights and what's going on, people fall or are hit by falling objects often.

In a recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 72% of workers injured in scaffolding-related accidents were due to either the planking or other support structure giving way and falling or the employee slipping due to the planking or structure being slick, and also people on the scaffolding structure being struck by falling objects. OSHA's regulations are very in-depth and detailed. Employers are required to know these regulations, and oftentimes, they'll have OSHA-certified employees on the job site to ensure that everybody is satisfying the OSHA regulations regarding whatever dangerous activity they're performing at the time.

OSHA has regulations regarding multiple different types of scaffolding or raised working equipment. For example, they have regulations on scissor lifts and working safely with scissor lifts, ladderjack scaffolds, supported scaffolds and working safely with those, tube and coupler scaffolds, narrow frame scaffolds, general scaffolding. They also have regulations regarding scaffolding in construction environments, as well as shipyard...

Fall protection is a very important topic for people that work from heights. One of the most common reasons employers are cited by OSHA in San Antonio, Texas and beyond is for violating fall protection regulations in incidents where workers are injured on the job. When employers do not provide proper fall protection and enforce the use of it, workers can be seriously injured or killed on the job.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: One of the earliest cases I worked on as a young lawyer involved a worker who was injured on the job. In that case, OSHA did a full investigation following his injury to determine whether or not the employer had followed the OSHA required regulations regarding safety. I learned, in that case, how difficult it is to get information from OSHA, how important they are in the investigation, and what the outcome is of their investigation. That case involved a man who was injured after falling from a scaffolding. There were questions about whether or not he was provided the safety equipment, and whether or not he was using it properly at the time his injury occurred.

OSHA is a federal agency who is tasked with evaluating and enforcing safety rules and regulations on employers and at worksites. Generally, their goal is to make sure that they require employers, and those in control of worksites, to make sure that they're safe. If somebody's injured on the job and OSHA does do an investigation, if they find violations or deficiencies regarding OSHA standards, they have the ability to find and sanction employers.

In 2019, they listed what their most commonly cited violations were. The number one most commonly cited violation was fall protection, and the general requirements of fall protection outlined by OSHA. This is a standard that outlines where fall protection is required. It goes on to say what types of systems are required, what has to be given to employees. It's designed to protect employees, if they're walking, working, standing, or whatnot, on surfaces that don't have a protected edge, like a fence or a wall, and it's above six feet. In those situations, employer should know that they have to follow OSHA regulations regarding fall protection.

Some of the most commonly cited sections of the fall protection guidelines that lead to employers being sanctioned or fined include employees that are working in the residential section, the residential construction area, and that their activities, if they're six or more feet above the ground, that they have to be protected by some guardrail, or a safety netting system, or they have to be wearing a personal fall protection, or fall arrest system.

Now all of these OSHA regulations get very deep into the specifics of what fall protection is required, and when it's required. For example, we know that OSHA regulations require that if employees are working on a roof that is considered to be a steep roof, that doesn't have protected sides, that they're required to have things such as toe boards, or nets or other types of harness, or fall arrest systems. The fall protection guidelines of the OSHA regulations are there to ensure the safety of workers that are working at heights. We've discussed previously how fall protection is so important, because falls and slips and trips are one of the leading causes of injuries and deaths on the worksite.

We're going to go ahead...

OSHA has the ability to fine and sanction employers that do not take care of the safety of their employees and workplace. One of the more common violations includes not warning or training on the dangers associated with chemicals used, kept or made at a location. Too often workers are injured through exposure to toxic chemicals. Sometimes, those employers pay a fine for violations of the hazard communications regulations.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

A lot of workers in Texas and in San Antonio work in industries in which they're exposed to dangerous chemicals or other types of hazards. Currently, we're working on a few cases, one in which a young man was exposed to hydrogen sulfide, and he was a transport driver. Somehow or another, he came to have a vessel containing this dangerous gas in his vehicle and nobody told him what he was carrying.

In another case, we represent a bunch of workers who were working in a grocery warehouse when a bad ammonia leak happened. Many of them, likely hundreds, were exposed to some amount of ammonia, whether they were working at the time, driving by, on the plant, or just in the general area. It was a very, very large exposure.

We've talked recently about OSHA, and how OSHA afterwards will get involved in on the job injuries and exposures to determine whether or not the employer did everything they should, following all the federal rules and regulations. If not, they will do an investigation and oftentimes fine or somehow sanction those employers. They do this to make sure that employers maintain a safe workplace and that employees have all the chance they can to not be injured on the job in a variety of ways.

We've talked recently about the most common causes of employers getting sanctioned or written up or fined by OSHA. The most commonly cited violations. We spoke recently about fall protection being the number one cause of OSHA citations. The second most commonly cited cause of OSHA citations and violations are the hazard communication sets of rules and regulations.

Now, these standards address a few things, but they're typically revolved around chemical hazards in the workplace. That involves chemicals that are being produced on-site in a facility, or chemicals that are brought on the facility off-site but used in whatever processes happen at that location.

Some of the more commonly cited portions of the hazard communication regulations include that employers are required to keep some sort of written program on-site. That written program has to provide certain things such as labeling, warnings, safety, safety data sheets, training to the employees, information availability to the employees. Generally, just the idea that if people are working around dangerous chemicals, they should be trained on what they are, trained on how to respond to an emergency, and understand how to handle them in a safe manner.

Another thing that is commonly cited in the hazard communication guidelines is whether or not employees are continuously trained as new chemicals are brought on site. When a new employee is hired and there's dangerous chemicals on the location, OSHA requires that those new employees are trained on them, as we previously discussed. OSHA also requires that if new chemicals are brought onto the property that employees get trained on them. Not only trained, but they also need to be labeled, warnings need to be available, and the safety...

Texas has one of the worst records in the United States for workers injured on the job. There are lot of causes of injuries on the job and we cover the most common causes of Texas workplace injuries in this episode.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Justin Hill: San Antonio is a city full of blue-collar workers. There's a lot of hardworking people in San Antonio that work in dangerous jobs. Because of that, we get called from a lot of people or their family members that have cases that involve injuries on the job or incidents where somebody has lost their life while working. We get a lot of calls about whether this is normal, what did the employer do or not do that they should've done, what the injured party could've done to help prevent this.

Oftentimes, we're asked questions by our clients if we think they did something wrong. More often, we get clients that tell us that they had repeatedly told their employers and their bosses about some danger or some safety equipment or some need that was not met. What we see more often are workers who are very conscious of their safety and the safety of their co-workers. They want a safer work environment. They want the best equipment, and they want to all be held to that high standard to make sure nobody got hurt.

We see the normal on-the-job injuries that track what the state and the federal government says are the most common on-the-job injuries. The National Safety Council actually did a breakdown on what the most common cause of work-related injuries are. They broke it into three categories, and the first being overexertion and bodily reaction. This includes things such as physical effort that leads to some injury, lifting, straining, stressing.

This also includes repetitive motion. Some jobs necessarily require the worker to be in a position to where they have repetitive stress or strain or vibration put on their body. These are the most common causes, according to the National Safety Council, and that makes sense. People hurt themselves lifting and straining and pulling and pressing.

The second most common cause of injuries on the job were slips, trips, and falls. This includes different types of incidents where the worker maybe catches themselves, but injures themselves while catching themselves, falling from high objects, falling down objects such as stairs. This also includes incidents where structures collapse.

We spoke recently about a case where we had a roofer who was roofing a patio structure, and the whole structure collapsed under him. He suffered very serious leg injuries-- leg injuries that were so bad that he probably won't work again. This also includes people that are jumping trying to avoid a fall. People that attempt to catch themselves sometimes harm themselves while doing that.

The third most common leading cause of work-related injuries listed by the National Safety Council are contacts with objects and equipment. This includes things like a moving object striking a worker, whether it can be an I-beam being lifted by a cable on a crane, a vehicle, a forklift. We've seen all of those examples in our own office. This includes a worker striking against an object or equipment. It would include being kicked or pushed or pulled into a piece of equipment.

We've also seen incidents such as a worker's body being...

When workers must clean or maintain machinery, they must have a way to secure the machinery in a way that no energy is unleashed on the worker. OSHA's lockout and tagout regulations ensure that employers have a plan and method to lockout equipment and to train employees. With the large numbers of injuries to workers in Texas, this is very important for employers to follow and know.

Transcript:

Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

In law school, we were able to take a class called Personal Injury Trial Law from a local injury lawyer. We joked that the class was show and tell because of what he did in his teaching methods was more akin to showing and telling us the type of work he does, the reason his job exists, the hazards that plaintiff's lawyers and injury lawyers had been able to eradicate from society, and generally, it was entertaining, in that it was so real world for us.

Constitutional law is not something people sit around and talk about, but everybody knows somebody that's been in a car crash, and a lot of people know someone that's been injured on the job. I remember one of the stories he told us was about a man who lost both of his hands while at work. He worked with a metal press, and what he had to do was put sheet metal in this press, and then the metal press would stamp out little circular disks.

The way the machine was built was that he had to position both of the sheets of metal and the stamp in a certain location, but then to operate the stamp, he had to push two buttons at the same time. Those buttons were about four feet apart. If you think about it, he had to be able to use both of his hands to push those buttons. The reason it was designed that way was so you wouldn't get your hands stuck in the equipment. What you didn't want was your hand to be there when the stamp came down.

At some point, the employer decided that that was slowing down the process, so they removed the hand buttons that required two buttons at once and replaced it with a foot pedal. Well, as you can imagine, removing that safety equipment meant there was nothing stopping that energy and force if a hand was in the way. One day, this man was doing his job as he had done for about 10 years, but he was using the foot pedal that had been added to the machine. He pushed it while his hands weren't out of the way, and they were both partially amputated.

I remember thinking how crazy that was, and now that I've done this job for over a decade, I realize that some employers care that much about speeding up processes and that much about making more money per hour of work. We've been talking about OSHA violations and the most common OSHA violations. One of the most common OSHA violations is violations of the lockout/tagout procedures outlined by OSHA.

Lockout/tagout is intended to help employees avoid getting injured by hazardous energy. Different types of energy sources include hydraulic, pneumatic, mechanical, electrical, chemical, thermal, or other sources of energy that can come from machines or equipment, and that those types of energy can be hazardous.

What we know is that oftentimes, machinery and equipment have to be maintained, and when equipment and machinery have to be maintained, there needs to be some way to secure them, so that the parties maintaining them won't be injured by some hazardous energy being unloaded into them or a part of their body. What we know is that hazardous energy,...