In this workers’ compensation action, an administrative law judge “ALJ” for the State Board of Workers’ Compensation granted Wendy Harris’s claim for benefits after finding that she sustained an injury arising out of and in the course of her employment. After the Board’s Appellate Division affirmed and adopted the decision of the ALJ, Harris’s employer, the Peach County Board of Commissioners, appealed to the Superior Court of Peach County. The superior court concluded that the ALJ and the Board’s Appellate Division misapplied the legal standard in determining whether Harris’s injury arose out of her employment and reversed the award. Harris appeals, seeking reinstatement of the Board’s decision.1 For the following reasons, we reverse the decision of the superior court. On appeal from an award of the Appellate Division of the State Board of Workers’ Compensation, this Court examines the record to see if there is competent evidence to support the award and construes the evidence in a light most favorable to the prevailing party. . . . Further, it is axiomatic that the findings of the State Board of Workers’ Compensation, when supported by any evidence, are conclusive and binding, and that neither the superior court nor this court has any authority to substitute itself as a fact finding body in lieu of the board. Citations and punctuation omitted. Keystone Auto. v. Hall , __Ga. App.__ 1 Case No. A08A0086, decided July 10, 2008. “The question of whether the trial court applied the correct legal standard in evaluating the evidence, however, is one of law, which we review de novo.” Citation and punctuation omitted. Id. Construed in a light most favorable to Harris, the evidence demonstrates that, at the time of her injury, she worked as a custodian in the Peach County Courthouse. Her duties included cleaning floors, cleaning restrooms, and removing trash. After reporting to work on March 17, 2006, Harris took her cleaning cart and cleaned the restrooms and then went to get paper towels and tissues to restock the restrooms. On her way back to the restrooms, Harris stopped in the hall to discuss work issues with her supervisor. During the conversation, Harris realized a diuretic pill she had placed in her pocket was not there. Her supervisor saw a pill on the floor and pointed it out to Harris. Harris bent to pick up the pill, “heard something pop” in her left knee, and collapsed. She sustained an anterior dislocation of her knee, for which she has had two surgeries, and is temporarily disabled. At the hearing before the ALJ, Harris’s supervisor testified that it was Harris’s duty as a custodian to remove a foreign object such as the pill from the floor, regardless of whether the object was her own medication. Regarding the cause of Harris’s injury, her doctor opined as follows: “It was believed that her left knee dislocation was caused by an extreme weight being put on the knee and her reaching down to pick up a pill putting energy across her knee that caused her knee to dislocate and then land on her bottom. Typically this is a high-energy injury, but with her size this could potentially be enough force in the wrong position that it could cause this to occur.”
The ALJ found that “the pressure of Harris’s weight —slightly less than 300 pounds —” when she bent over “in an awkward position caused injury to her knee.”2 Because Harris was on duty at the time of the injury and because bending over to retrieve a foreign object from the floor was among the “peculiar duties of her job as a custodian,” the ALJ found that Harris’s injury arose out of and in the course of her employment. The Board’s Appellate Division adopted the ALJ’s findings of fact and conclusions of law. The superior court reversed after concluding that the hazard that resulted in Harris’s injury did not arise in any part from her employment but arose solely from her obesity and that, “because she was equally exposed to the risk of being injured by her obesity both on and off the job, she cannot properly say that her work caused her injuries.” Harris contends the superior court failed to construe the evidence in her favor, substituted its own findings of fact for those of the Board, and erred in concluding that her injury was caused by a risk to which she would have been equally exposed apart from her employment.
