Injured ride technician . . . has spent nearly $50,000 on legal and medical bills . . . “the way I was treated [by the board] wasn’t right.” Linda Nguyen, Vancouver Sun.
VANCOUVER – For almost seven years, Giovanni Cianelli’s life has been a roller coaster of mounting debt from medical bills.
The 38-year-old ride technician at the Pacific National Exhibition has been fighting with the Workers’ Compensation Board and its appeal tribunal ever since a 17,000-kilogram gondola struck him in the mid-back in July 2000.
A B.C. Supreme Court judge has now ordered the board to review Cianelli’s case again, after his claim was denied twice.
“I am optimistic this time around. I don’t think they had all the information correct, so this is good news that I’m getting another review,” the East Vancouver resident said of Friday’s court decision.
Cianelli, who has worked at the PNE since high school, was unscrewing bolts on a suspended gondola when it began to move, knocking him to the ground.
He landed face down, injuring his forehead and nose and bruising his ribs.
It wasn’t until he returned to work after a five-week absence that the pain started getting worse.
Cianelli, a father of two young girls, said he didn’t realize how serious the pain was until he was taken to the emergency room because it began creeping from his feet up to his lower back.
According to court documents, the Workers’ Compensation Board (which was re-branded WorkSafeBC) denied his claims in 2003 and 2006 because Cianelli’s pain couldn’t be attributed to the accident.
Justice Austin Cullen has ordered the board to look at new medical evidence in the review, and not just use the facts presented in the 2003 claim. Cianelli said he has spent nearly $50,000 on legal and medical bills, including biweekly physiotherapy and massage therapy visits.
But he’s still happy to be back working full-time at the PNE for his 20th summer.
“I’m still struggling and sometimes I don’t sleep at night. But the PNE has been supportive because they know I got injured badly and that the way I was treated [by the board] wasn’t right,” he said.
This entry was posted on Saturday, June 30th, 2007 at 8:18 am and is filed under Appeals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It makes me happy to hear that an injured workers employer is there to assist. I wish my employer had been doing the same instead of assisting the WCB to cut me off, the tactics the were used by both was unbelievable, the company I worked for was new to Canada, from the US, they were mad that I got injured, and wrote reports of situations that didn’t even happen, they stated to my foreman ( who they didn’t know I car pooled with) that I ( the injured worker) would not get away with this in the States and that they were going to revamp the Canadian style of WCB, it took over a year to battle my company and WCB, both made false statements about my injury even to the point of job completion and length of call ( claimed it was a 2 week call out when it actually was a call out for a month plus and job ended in November but they were still hiring in July the following year for same job site), employer stated that they had offered me light duty work 3 months after injury and I refused, there is nothing further from the truth, however I did end up winning in appeals over all this but still had to fight for over a year with no income and living off what little savings I had accumulated