Mathew Bailey Watson suffered a back injury during his employment with Applied Industrial Technologies Applied Industrial when he attempted to lift a heavy trash container with one arm while moving by on a forklift. After receiving workers’ compensation benefits from Applied Industrial for the job-related injury, Watson sued General Mechanical Services, Inc. General Mechanical as a third party tortfeasor.1 He alleged that employees of General Mechanical doing repair work on the Applied Industrial conveyor system negligently caused his back injury by discarding heavy metal conveyor parts in the container, which was located under a sign stating that the container was only for disposal of paper or plastic. General Mechanical moved for summary judgment on various grounds including the defense that, even if its employees put the metal parts in the container, it was not liable on the negligence claim because there was no foreseeable risk of harm. The trial court granted summary judgment in favor of General Mechanical, and the Watsons appeal. For the following reasons, we affirm. Watson operated a type of four-wheeled, motorized forklift known as an “order picker” used to pick product orders from rows of shelves at the Applied Industrial warehouse. The record shows that operators traveled in the order pickers while standing on an attached platform carried a few inches off the floor. After traveling to the area where an order was located, operators raised the platform on which they were standing to the height of the appropriate shelf, picked the order from the shelf and placed it on a table located on the rear of the platform, then lowered the platform back down to floor level. At the end of each work shift, an order picker was used with the platform in the lowered position to pick up and empty trash containers located at the end of each row of shelves in the warehouse. Watson suffered the back injury at issue while operating an order picker for this task.
The trash containers were open, barrel-shaped plastic containers about three feet high with about a 30 to 40 gallon capacity. According to Watson, every container had a sign over it stating that the container was only for disposal of paper or plastic. Watson testified by deposition that, while he was traveling in the order picker and steering it with his right hand from a standing position on the platform, he reached out with his left arm as he approached a trash container, grabbed it with his left hand, and attempted to pull it up onto the platform table as he passed by the container. Watson testified that picking up trash containers in this fashion while on the move was his usual method, and that no one ever told him not to do it that way. But this time, instead of containing paper and plastic and weighing only 5 or 10 pounds, as Watson expected, the container was nearly full of discarded metal roller parts of the type used on the conveyer system at the warehouse, and weighed 80 to 100 pounds. Watson did not look into the container before attempting to lift it with one arm while passing by, so he did not know that the container had metal rollers in it and was much heavier than the usual 5 or 10 pounds. Watson testified that, when he grabbed the trash container as he passed by, “it didn’t move and it snatched him back” onto the table to the rear of the platform and off the order picker, injuring his back.
