Aging Can Be a Defense to Noise-Induced Hearing Loss Claim
There are some injuries in Pennsylvania’s workers’ compensation laws for which no showing of disability is necessary to obtain an award of benefits. These cases, called “specific losses,” include facial disfigurement and loss of use of a body part. One of the types of cases in this category is a claim for loss of hearing, as a result of excessive noise exposure at work.
Generally, the injured worker need only prove that he or she suffers from a permanent hearing loss of at least 10 percent, and that the hearing loss was caused by the long-term exposure to hazardous occupational noise at work. Whether the occupational noise was “hazardous” is not part of the burden faced by the injured worker; instead, that would be an affirmative defense the workers’ compensation insurance carrier could offer. A previous Pennsylvania Supreme Court case from 2000, LTV Steel Co. v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board, established that no deduction can be made from the hearing impairment for the normal aging process.
Recently, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania faced some of these issues in McCool v. Workers’ Compensation Appeal Board (Sunoco, Inc.). Here, the injured worker was employed as a firefighter for the City of Philadelphia from 1983 to 1998, then as a refinery operator for Sunoco from 2003 to 2008. In 2001, the injured worker had an audiogram done, which showed less than a 10% hearing impairment. Nearly annual audiograms then, starting in 2002, showed, according to the case, “pre-existing hearing loss that continued to accelerate across all frequencies.”