North Carolina Supreme Court Confirms Dismissal in University Accident Suit in Win for Phelps

Phelps obtained an important win for its client, a major research university in the Triangle Research area and all its employees, in a wrongful death case arising out of an industrial accident on campus.

The North Carolina Supreme Court this month affirmed that the trial court properly granted Phelps’ motion for summary judgment on all claims—thus ending the case without a trial. 

In this case, the plaintiff’s decedent, who was an employee of a subcontractor, and the defendants, who are maintenance workers at the university, were tasked with draining a mobile HVAC chiller unit to enable contractors to move the unit as part of a construction project.  

The chiller had been disconnected from water and electricity, and it was assumed to be depressurized.  Below freezing temperatures in the area caused refrigerant tubes in the unit to freeze and crack, which led to a chain reaction that resulted in the unexpected pressurization of the unit.

The plaintiff’s decedent failed to realize the unit was pressurized.  He and a coworker were attempting to remove a metal cap from an intake pipe on the unit when the cap blew off the pipe and struck him in the face and head.  He suffered catastrophic injuries that led to his death five days later.

The decedent’s estate alleged the defendants were negligent because they failed to use antifreeze when disconnecting and draining the chiller unit, and that such negligence led to the damage to the refrigerant tubes, the inadvertent pressurization of the unit and ultimately the decedent’s injuries and death.

The Phelps team spent months leading discovery and obtaining expert and fact witness testimony. The team persuaded the trial court to grant summary judgment for all of our clients on the eve of a jury trial, successfully arguing  that the plaintiff’s catastrophic injury could not have been a reasonably foreseeable result of the alleged negligence of the defendants.  Instead, the tragedy occurred through “an improbable chain of events that industry veterans had never seen before.” The North Carolina Court of Appeals affirmed, and plaintiff’s estate took the case to the North Carolina Supreme Court.

In a 5-2 decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the entry of summary judgment for the defendants, thus ending the lawsuit.

The Phelps team was led by Raleigh partners Patrick Meacham and Jonathan E. Hall.