San Antonio, TX — There was a serious accident reported in San Antonio this past Wednesday (July 15, 2015) that involved a worker trapped underneath a house. The news reported on this, saying that a 39-year old foundation worker was repairing the foundation of a house when it fell off its jack and trapped him underneath it.
The man, who wasn’t named, was very badly injured and had to be taken to the hospital in critical condition.
According to the reports so far, it looks like the man was part of a work crew and was working on the foundation of a yellow house on Sterling Drive that day.
The workers said that the house was up on several jacks when something happened and one of the jacks failed, dropping the house about 2 feet. The 39-year old man who was under the house was trapped by the weight and was critically injured. Fortunately, his co-workers were able to put another jack underneath the house and help him breathe until firefighters could cut a hole in the floor and free him.
He was taken to a hospital in critical condition and his name isn’t being released right now. It’s also not clear who he was working for at the time.
Map of the Accident
Commentary:
How in the world does something like this even happen? Does anybody have more information on what happened here, because this kind of thing is simply unacceptable. I know that some of the news reports quote the workers at the site, saying that the jack failed. If that’s the case, then someone should definitely look a little further into this, perhaps call the company that manufactured the jack and see about getting them to issue a recall.
However, I think it’s probably a little more likely that this worker was put in a dangerous situation without the right kind of safety measures in place. It happens a lot with smaller businesses, especially in the construction and manual labor field. The problem is that these workers are put into dangerous situations by their supervisors, or they aren’t given the right tools for the job.
While the manager/owner/boss is content to contract out the work, it’s the employees and workers themselves who end up getting hurt because of his negligence. Texas has laws that apply to this kind of thing, but I won’t bore my readers with all the technical details. The basic idea is that if this employer doesn’t have workers’ compensation coverage for his employees, then any kind of accident falls back on him and the company.
— Grossman Law Offices
