Jury clears companies in death at UI

A Spokane County jury refused Thursday to blame a manufacturer and two other companies for an April 2000 accident in which a University of Idaho maintenance worker was killed in a giant ventilation fan.

Instead, the jury said, technician Joel P. Crisp and the university were responsible for Crisp being sucked into the 4-foot maw of a 75-horsepower squirrel-cage fan capable of generating an 80 mph wind.

Crisp’s widow and four sons couldn’t sue the university because he was covered by Idaho’s worker compensation program.

The Colfax resident was one of the people who were called when students, professors and others complained about the heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems in university buildings.

Crisp, 43, had 17 years’ experience as an “HVAC” control technician, most of it at UI in Moscow.

Jurors apparently agreed with defendants that Crisp should have known better than to enter the fan room, or plenum, while the fan was running. And that the university should have made certain of it.

Testimony indicated Crisp was one of a number of workers who frequently entered metal-enclosed “air-handling units” on the roof of the newly renovated Gauss Engineering Building without turning off fans inside the units.

No one witnessed Crisp’s death, but attorneys for his survivors speculated he may have entered the fan room to confirm that the fan was moving air at the rate gauges indicated.

The jury heard testimony for a month and deliberated most of Thursday before ruling there was nothing negligent or reckless about manufacturing or installing such powerful fans without screens over their intake holes.

Instead, the jury said, the University of Idaho and Crisp were to blame for ignoring warnings to turn off the fan before entering its enclosure.

Crisp was 30 percent responsible for his own death, and the university was 70 percent responsible, jurors unanimously agreed.

Four corporate defendants in the multimillion-dollar lawsuit were completely exonerated. They are Spokane-based MW Consulting Engineers, Boise-based Armstrong Architects, Portland-based Pace Corp. and Pace’s parent, York International Corp. of York, Penn.

Defense attorneys declined to comment on their victory, citing the tragic nature of Crisp’s death.

Dick Eymann, one of three attorneys for Crisp’s family, said the plaintiffs likely will appeal Superior Court Judge Kathleen O’Connor’s handling of the case. Of particular concern, Eymann said, was O’Connor’s pretrial dismissal of the general contractor for the project in which the fan was installed.

Swank Enterprises, a Montana corporation, had been a defendant before the complicated case was tried under a combination of Idaho and Washington law.

The plaintiffs sought more than $8.8 million in damages for a death they said could have been prevented with a $20 metal mesh screen.

Although legally complex, the issue was simple, according to plaintiffs’ attorney Jim King: “Great big fan, great big motor and no guard on it.”

But defense attorneys marshaled several industry experts who said Spokane attorneys King and Eymann and Colfax attorney Leslie Cloaninger were trying to turn a huge and highly competitive industry on its head.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys persuaded O’Connor to rule that the fan in question was subject to a federal safety rule requiring guards with “openings no larger than one-half inch.” But HVAC industry engineers said the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has determined the rule is satisfied by lockable doors on air-handling units.

“The door is the guard,” Portland attorney Thomas Dulcich argued on behalf of Pace and York. “…If York is reckless, then they are part of a vast HVAC conspiracy and they have co-opted the OSHA inspectors.”

MW Consulting Engineers attorney Pat Risken, of Spokane, and Armstrong Architects attorney Rob Anderson, of Boise, argued that their clients properly relied on HVAC industry standards. UI officials, not MW or Armstrong, decided not buy optional fan screens, Risken and Anderson said.

“You can’t make safety optional,” King argued, especially not since a Colorado technician was seriously injured in 1995 when he was sucked into the fan of an air-handling unit.

That accident was different, Dulcich countered. The controls of that air-handling unit were inside the fan room, while the University of Idaho unit had exterior controls, he said.

Although technicians employed by York and Pace sometimes have to enter air-handling units while fans are running, technicians employed by customers are never supposed to do so, Dulcich contended. Customers are supposed to keep fan-room doors locked and allow workers inside only after padlocking power switches in the off position, he said.

The University of Idaho adopted such a policy after Crisp’s death, and installed screens over fan openings.

Testimony indicated the door of the fan room in which Crisp died had a lock when it was delivered, but an unknown person removed the lock for unknown reasons.