PRODUCTS LIABILITY ACTION AGAINST ELEVATOR MANUFACTURER SHOULD HAVE SURVIVED SUMMARY JUDGMENT, LABOR LAW 240(1) INAPPLICABLE TO ELEVATOR ACCIDENT.
The First Department, reversing Supreme Court, determined there was a question fact whether a defective elevator part caused the elevator to fall when plaintiff, who was repairing the elevator, was in the elevator car. The court further determined plaintiff’s Labor Law 240(1) was properly dismissed because securing the elevator to prevent a fall would have made repairing the elevator impossible:
… [P]aintiff raised issues of fact whether the shim was defective and a cause of the accident and whether there was a failure to warn. Plaintiff’s expert opined that the cracked shoe caused the elevator car to get wedged in the hoistway in the manner that plaintiff described, and … [an] engineer involved in the design of the elevator acknowledged that the car could come out of the rails and get hung up if a guide shoe cracked while the elevator was descending. The engineer also testified that, after a previous instance in which a similar guide shoe by the same manufacturer had cracked because bolts had been over-tightened, [the manufacturer] had redesigned the shim in 2003 to prevent the guide shoe from cracking because of over-tightening of the bolts, but had made no effort to notify customers whose elevators had the older shims.
The elevator was not a safety device within the meaning of Labor Law § 240(1) … . Plaintiff’s reliance on McCrea v Arnlie Realty Co. LLC (140 AD3d 427 [1st Dept 2016]) is unavailing. In that case, the elevator on which the plaintiff was engaged in repair work fell onto the plaintiff because it had not been secured. In this case, plaintiff was inside the elevator, riding up and down to test it. To the extent plaintiff may have been engaged in “repair” within the meaning of Labor Law § 240(1), the statute does not apply, because any securing device would have defeated the purpose of his work by precluding him from riding the elevator … . Versace v 1540 Broadway L.P., 2017 NY Slip Op 01813, 1st Dept 3-15-17
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