Tennessee amputee receives workers’ compensation

An accident 18 years ago led to the amputation of a bus driver’s left hand and a partial amputation of his left leg. The accident happened when a car cut off the bus he was driving. Of the 22 injured people on the bus, the bus driver suffered the worst injuries. As would happen concerning similar work accidents in Tennessee, the bus driver instituted a workers’ compensation claim.

After the accident, his career became problematic. He had a substantial number of accidents. In fact, of the 24 accidents that he was involved in, nine were his fault. The amputee found he had become a problem employee, facing one disciplinary hearing after another. He even faced being fired twice.

Apart from the high number of accidents, he regularly had confrontations with passengers. In 2008, he was almost fired after one more run-in with a passenger. At that time, he removed a female passenger and her daughter from his bus merely because the sound of the daughter’s popping bubble gum was too loud. One of the lasting consequences of the original accident, according to the bus driver, was a hypersensitivity to sound.

At the beginning of 2013, the bus driver was allowed to resign rather than face a firing for the second time. At that point in time, his employer felt he had been in too many preventable accidents. Now, a little more than a year later, the settlement of the workers’ compensation claim should provide some comfort for the man. Injuries while on duty are very often life changing, and workers in Tennessee who suffered such injuries may find that claiming workers’ compensation benefits can bring much needed relief under difficult circumstances.

Source: Sun Sentinel, “Amputee bus driver gets $777,000 payout“, Brittany Wallman, May 6, 2014