Posted by Jerry Heilman on 2/01/14

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On January 26th, 2013, I was at my new house painting up
inside one of the skylight tunnels in the dinning room. My
wife was right next to me so that she could hand me paint
filled rollers and what ever else I might need while working
in the confined space.

I was using a 6' Werner FS106 fiberglass ladder, rated for
250 lbs, that was maybe a year old and is always stored in
my shop. I was on the fourth rung from the bottom. Due to
the confined area I was working in, there was no way
possible to be leaning hardly at all in any direction, so I
was centered over the ladder.

In a nut shell, all of a sudden the ladder dropped out from
under me and I fell out of the skylight tunnel and landed on
my right scapula on the hardwood floor. I ended up in the
emergency room with a small pneumothorax injury and spent
two days in the critical care center.

I went over to the house yesterday to look at everything.
Nothing has been moved since the accident and I am going
over today to get some photos. The right side rail was bent
in directly below the bottom rung about 45 degrees towards
the center of the ladder. The lateral support for the
bottom rung looks like it pushed up the bottom rung a good
3" in the middle. None of the fiberglass parts are torn
looking and I can not see any threads from fiberglass
tearing. Both side webs of the C channel side rail are
mushroomed outwards a lot. On the left hand side rail, you
can see a similar, but small, amount of deformation.

I have done some searching on the CPSC web site and with
Google and have found very little in the way of similar
accidents reported. This web site seems to be one of the
only places with similar incidents reported.

So, my question is, has anyone else had any similar
experience with Werner fiberglass ladders?

Re: Werner FS106 6' Fiberglass Ladder Failure, 6/05/16, by Bill Liss.

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