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Maraman v. Cooper Steel Fabricators11/6/2001
Plaintiffs Kenneth L. Maraman, Sr. (Kenneth, Sr.), and Mildred Maraman appeal the trial court's orders directing verdicts in favor of defendants Cooper Steel Fabricators (Cooper Steel) and James N. Gray Company (Gray). Plaintiffs are awarded a new trial as to Cooper Steel, but no error is found as to Gray.
Plaintiffs filed the instant action 12 December 1997 in Mecklenburg County Superior Court. Each defendant answered plaintiffs' complaint, cross claimed against the other for contribution or indemnity, and filed subsequent motions for summary judgment. The latter were denied by the trial court.
Trial commenced 25 October 1999. Plaintiffs' evidence tended to show the following: Gray served as general contractor for construction of a warehouse in Huntersville, North Carolina, and entered into a contract with Cooper Steel to perform steel fabrication and erection work at the job site. Kenneth L. Maraman, Jr. (decedent), and his father, Kenneth, Sr., were employed by Cooper Steel as steel erectors. Decedent was twenty-four years old and had worked in steel erection for approximately seven years.
On 15 December 1995, decedent and his father were working at the Huntersville warehouse job site. The building was being constructed by creation of a concrete pad and establishment of a series of columns rising upwards from ground level. Steel girders connected column to column and metal joists were assembled which connected girders to girders "cross ways," filling the space between them.
Equipment on the job included a man-lift, consisting of a bucket on a hydraulic lift with a telescoping pole. Steel erectors (workers) such as decedent utilized nylon safety belts equipped with lanyards that hooked to "D-rings" on the belts and to "tie-offs" on the bucket. When required to stand on steel components of the structure, workers would tie onto a safety line or "rat line," described as
a cable that generally runs from column to column. It is tied off on the [girder] but basically across the [girder], it should be from one end of the [girder] to the other.
Hooking the lanyard onto the safety line would enable workers to move from column to column while being tied off, and having the lanyard thus tied off to a safety line would prevent workers from falling more than six feet.
Kenneth, Sr., testified that on 15 December 1995 at about 1:00 p.m., he and a co-worker were ordered by Robert Marlowe (Marlowe), "senior man" for Cooper Steel at the site, to drop the safety lines from an area of the project where erection was complete so that the lines could be used in a forward section. Kenneth, Sr., recollected that some of the lines "got moved right up under the crane," but "were never used," and that he dropped safety lines "all the way up to two bays before I got to the connectors, which it didn't have no safety lines at that point any way."
Approximately four hours later that day, decedent was working as a "connector" at the open end of the building where erection was ongoing. According to Cooper Steel employee James Fults (Fults), a "connector's" job was to "catch" iron joists raised by the crane, "set [them] in place, and weld [them] down or bolt [them] up." Decedent went up in the man-lift some thirty-one and one-half feet above the ground to help place large joists into position. Fults described the joists as "huge," "the biggest joists I ever seen[,] 85 feet long. . . ."
Kenneth, Sr., testified that upon exiting the bucket onto a girder, decedent looked for a safety line upon which to attach his lanyard, but "there was no line there." Kenneth, Sr., further related that the ground crew raising the joist by means
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