Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 13, 1995 TAG: 9505150057
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
After working all day on the railroad, Allan Couch would go home at night with the blast of the train whistle and the roar of the locomotive still ringing in his ears.
Couch, a former brakeman for Norfolk Southern Corp., says that years of being exposed to excessive noise while working in Southwest Virginia's coal mines left him with permanent hearing loss.
But even worse, lawyers say, is a persistent roaring in Couch's ears that pushed him to the brink of insanity.
"It just drove him crazy; he couldn't handle it anymore," said Willard Moody, a Portsmouth lawyer who represented Couch when his lawsuit against the railroad when to trial this week.
After hearing five days of testimony, a jury decided Friday night that NS was negligent and ordered it to pay $2.6 million in damages to Couch.
The railroad's lawyers declined to comment after the verdict. But NS lawyers have complained in the past about what they say is a tendency by Roanoke juries to return excessive awards against the railroad in on-the-job injury lawsuits.
Since 1990, for example, Circuit Court juries have awarded more than $8 million to eight other injured workers. The verdicts ranged from $4.7 million for a signalman injured when a metal door slammed shut on him to $250,000 for a clerk who fell out of his chair. Half of those verdicts, however, were overturned on post-trial motions or appeals.
Testimony in Roanoke Circuit Court showed that tinnitus, or the roaring in Couch's ears, pushed him into states of deep depression and psychosis. Railroad lawyers had argued that Couch was mentally ill all along, and that he became increasingly paranoid - to the point that he believed agents for the railroad were hiding in storm sewers and behind trees to spy on him.
Couch's lawsuit was just one of hundreds that have been filed against the railroad by injured employees under the Federal Employer's Liability Act. There have also been dozens of hearing-loss cases filed in Roanoke, but Couch's case was unusual in that he blamed NS for his mental illness.
"I believe that the ringing in my ears has been so dramatic that I cannot tolerate anything today," he told the jury.
Willard and co-counsel Robert Small had argued that the railroad knew for years that the air horns, whistles and engines on its locomotives caused dangerously high noise levels, but did not require engineers and brakemen to wear ear protection until 1990.
That was too late for Couch, who worked for the railroad from 1970 to 1992. "While they were having big committee meetings in the corporate bureaucracy [to consider a noise protection policy], Allan Couch was out there working every day, to do what he could," Small said.
But Robert Schneider, a Pittsburgh lawyer who represented NS, countered that the railroad needed to conduct a comprehensive study before requiring employees to wear ear plugs.
The railroad "did not want to kill anybody," Schneider said, refering to concerns that ear plugs might prevent engineers and brakemen from hearing crucial safety warnings.
Had NS rushed to implement a policy only to have an accident happen, Schneider said, the same plaintiff's attorneys would be accusing it of negligence. "We're damned if we do and damned if we don't," he told the jury.
Referring to a confrontation that Couch had with a supervisor that he said finally "broke him" in 1987, Schneider said it was only a matter of time before Couch suffered a mental breakdown.
Testimony showed that Couch - a 46-year-old Russell County resident - had a strong distrust of authority figures, including supervisors at work, state police officers on the highway and even teachers in his elementary classes.
"It is a very cold, dark world for Mr. Couch, and it has been for some time now," Schneider told the jury. It's not fair to punish the railroad, he said, "because we had the misfortune to hire someone who came to us with a mental illness."
But Moody argued that all of Couch's mental problems can be traced back to the railroad's failure to protect its employees from excessive noise.
In addition to $1 million in lost wages, Moody had asked the jury to award his client another $2 million for the pain and suffering he has experienced from the mental problems that have wrecked his professional, social and family lives.
"Certainly, what they have done to his mind is much, much worse than the economic losses," Moody told the jury.
by CNB