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JaxPort Employee Injured On The Job 110 Feet Up

By Eddie Farah

An industrial accident at the Jacksonville Port Authority led to a dramatic but successful rescue for one injured employee.

The unidentified man was working on a 110 foot crane Monday night doing routine maintenance along with six other men, when he suffered a severe back injury. A safety line prevented him from falling to the ground.

To lower him to the ground, Jacksonville Fire-Rescue's Urban Search and Rescue Unit incorporated a basket and ropes to safely lower him, dangling precariously above the ground as was caught in some dramatic video by Channel 4 in Jacksonville.

Lowering the man took a tense 90 minutes, but Jacksonville Fire Rescue said they had trained for such an event, including how to safely put a man on a board to lower him down.

The man had to be hospitalized but has been released and is recovering at home.

This is just the latest bad news for this Jacksonville employer. Last week at the company's Blount Island facility, a crane weighing almost a thousand tons fell into a row of other cranes. Two of the $6 million cranes are in pieces and a third was damaged. No one was injured in this wreck, but certainly it had the potential.

Under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act employees working near dry docks, terminals, piers or wharfs are covered if they are moving cargo between the ship and land transportation and had some direct involvement with maritime activities.

The mission of the Act is to make sure that workers' compensation benefits are paid promptly and properly since working in these ports is dangerous work and back and neck injuries are not uncommon. Often these are catastrophic injuries that may take a lifetime of care. This man was very lucky. #

Originally posted at InjuryBoard by Eddie Farah

Full post as published by Jacksonville Personal Injury Lawyer on August 19, 2009 (boomark / email).