July 29, 2019

Family of former teacher at Bredbury Comprehensive School receive compensation

Posted in Injury, Mesothelioma

Prior to his illness our clients' father had been very active and enjoyed playing golf along with maintaining his woodwork hobby.

Whilst working as a teacher in woodwork, metal work and vocational courses our clients' father was exposed to asbestos during the course of his employment.

Given that our clients were quite young when their father was teaching the vocational courses we set about trying to locate witnesses who were either taught by our clients' father or worked alongside him so that we could produce evidence to support the case. In order to target the relevant location and age range we launched a Facebook witness appeal and had a tremendous response.

One of the witnesses that came forward was a former pupil at the school and was taught building practice course by out clients' father. He explained how they would be working on the heating systems within the school, this involved them stripping the asbestos lagging off of the old pipework in readiness for the heating system to be replaced. The boys would use a hammer and chisel in order to get the lagging off of the pipes. The witness described how the job was extremely dusty and that they were not provided with any masks or even gloves when they were carrying out the work. It was also described how they would take the old asbestos lagging debris out by the wheelbarrow load.

We had not overcome the hurdles in regards to evidence just yet though as our witness was concerned about providing evidence in relation to one of the defendant’s for whom he was contracted to work for. In order to overcome this hurdle we sought counsel’s advice and it was decided that we could anonymise the statement and produce it as an exhibit to the a statement from that of the fee earner who had taken the witness statement first hand.

Shortly afterwards a settlement was negotiated with the Defendants at a level our clients were very happy with.

 

 

Share on: