construction liability News

Asbestos Concerns Halt Restoration of Century-Old Washington Hotel

Restoration work on a century-old former hotel in eastern Washington has been halted after air quality inspectors say they found signs of asbestos. The Spokesman-Review reported that the state Department of Labor and Industries stopped work on the Otis Hotel …

5 Injured in Southern California Balcony Collapse

Four adults and a girl were injured after a second-story balcony collapsed at an apartment near downtown Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Fire Department says the South Park balcony collapsed, injuring three women, a man and a girl. The fire …

Who Will Foot the Bill for San Francisco’s $750M Millennium Tower?

Nina Agabian, a retired director of research in global health science at the University of California, bought a 29th-floor apartment in San Francisco’s Millennium Tower in 2010. “It was supposed to be a wonderful building,” she said in January, sitting …

California Moving to Study Balcony Safety After Fatal Berkeley Collapse

California is moving to study state balcony standards after a fatal collapse in Berkeley sent shock and horror across the globe last year. Legislation Gov. Jerry Brown signed last week creates a working group to recommend ways to construct better …

N.Y. Group: Scaffold Law Will Consume Billions From Public Projects Spending

The Lawsuit Reform Alliance of New York (LRANY) said New York’s “Scaffold Law” continues to drive up the cost of construction in the state and warned that the law would consume billions of dollars from the newly proposed infrastructure projects …

Zurich Insurance Q3 Profit Falls 79% on Losses from Tianjin Port Explosions

Zurich Insurance Group AG said profit fell 79 percent in the third quarter after it booked $275 million in losses from the Tianjin disaster and set aside $367 million more in reserves to cover mainly North American auto and construction …

New York Forms Task Force to Probe Corruption in Construction Industry

New York’s building boom has spurred the formation of a task force to probe corruption in the construction industry after a worker was killed earlier this year. The task force of prosecutors and inspectors was announced Wednesday after two men …

New York Court Examines Scope of Scaffold Law in 2 Injury Cases

The New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, ruled on two injury cases on April 2, examining whether the injuries in those cases fit within the scope of the state’s Labor Law 240, popularly known as the Scaffold …

Colorado Senate Passes Condo Builder Liability Measure

A bill to make it harder to sue condominium builders has cleared its first hurdle in the Colorado Legislature. The measure would make it harder to sue builders of single and multifamily homes for defective construction. It would require that …

Opinion: Study Suggesting N.Y. Scaffold Law Causes Injuries Misuses Statistical Techniques

[Editor’s Note: The following is a commentary on a recent study from the New York Civil Justice Institute. The study argues that the New York’s “Scaffold Law” diverts millions of dollars to legal costs and insurance and that the law …