Wyoming: Unusual Exertion Opening Mud-Caked Access Panel Means Fatal Heart Attack Was Compensable Injury

Where a heavy equipment maintenance worker died following a massive heart attack and prior to the onset of the worker’s cardiac symptoms he complained to his wife that he had great difficulty opening an access panel required to service one of his employer’s front loaders—it was caked with mud—the Office of Administrative Hearings (OAH) erred in finding that the widow had proved the required causal link between the work exertion and the heart attack, but had failed to prove that the exertion itself was unusual or abnormal for an employee servicing heavy equipment, held the Supreme Court of Wyoming. Acknowledging that it was appropriate to use an objective test that did not focus on the activities or characteristics of an individual employee, but rather to compare the employee’s specific exertion to the usual exertion of other employees engaged in the same or similar activity, the Court held that the overwhelming weight of the evidence established that it was unusual or abnormal to encounter an access panel that was stuck or physically “very hard” to open or close. The OAH order was, therefore, unsupported by substantial evidence and required reversal.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance. Bracketed citations link to lexis.com.

See Scherf v. State ex rel. Dep’t of Workforce Servs., 2015 WY 130, 2015 Wyo. LEXIS 146 (Sept. 23, 2015) [2015 WY 130, 2015 Wyo. LEXIS 146 (Sept. 23, 2015)]

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 44.04 [44.04]

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law.

For more information about LexisNexis products and solutions connect with us through our corporate site