In Schick v. 200 Blydenburgh, LLC, et al., 2d Department decided October 4, 2011, the plaintiff sustained injury when he fell from a ladder on which he was standing. The Court set forth the facts as follows;
“On March 9, 2007, the date of the subject accident, Pal Supply had not yet moved into the premises. That morning, the injured plaintiff (hereinafter the plaintiff), a field technician for Verizon, was assigned to provide telephone service for Pal Supply at the warehouse. According to the plaintiff’s deposition testimony, upon arrival at the warehouse, he discovered that the installation of three telephone lines would involve connecting the terminal located at the telephone pole on the road to an existing underground wire leading to a serving terminal located inside the rear of the warehouse. The plaintiff testified that he thought he would then install the Network Interface Device (hereinafter the NID), which would house the three telephone lines, a few feet from this serving terminal. However, according to the plaintiff, a Pal Supply employee told him to run a wire from the serving terminal along the ceiling to an area above the office doorway, and to install the NID over the doorway.
The plaintiff further testified at his deposition that he installed the cross connection wire from the telephone pole terminal to the underground wire, tested the dial tone at the serving terminal, and attached the wire from the serving terminal along the wall leading from the serving terminal up to the ceiling. The plaintiff attached the wire to existing structural trusses using plastic zip ties, slicing off the tails of the ties with a diagonal cutter. As the plaintiff was attaching the wire to the trusses that were near the ceiling, which were approximately 20 feet high, he felt the ladder on which he was standing shift up and down, the bottom of the ladder slid out, and the plaintiff fell to the floor. The plaintiff alleged that the ladder slipped or shifted due to sand, dirt, or dust on the floor.”