The Fort Worth Court of Appeals has affirmed a trial court order granting summary judgment to a contractor in a worksite injury case in which the plaintiff alleged that the contractor retained control of the subcontractor’s work.
Jeremy Haggard v. Blattner Energy, Inc. (No. 02-25-00056; February 26, 2026) arose from a 2019 worksite injury at an Iowa windfarm. Plaintiff worked as a rigger, hooking parts to the crane, signaling instructions to the crane operator, and serving as the crane crew’s foreman. While standing on top of a wind tower’s old nacelle without fall protection, Plaintiff was knocked off when the crane operator “let this load swing out of control.” Plaintiff hit the crane’s stowage container on his way to the ground, injuring his abdomen. Plaintiff sued four entities, including Blattner, alleging negligence and gross negligence. After the close of discovery, Blattner filed traditional and no-evidence MSJs asserting no duty. The trial court granted summary judgment. Plaintiff appealed.
In an opinion by Justice Kerr, the court of appeals affirmed. NextEra Energy, which owned the windfarm, contracted with Blattner for “repowering” and with GE for equipment supply and restarting the turbines. Blattner’s job was to provide engineering, procedure, and construction services, which involved isolating the tower from electricity, removing vintage GE components, setting them on the ground, installing and rewiring new GE components, and inspecting and certifying the completion of the work. NextEra would then inspect and issue a certificate of completion, freeing Blattner to move on to the next tower. GE’s job was to disassemble and remove used parts that Blattner placed at each tower’s base, of which GE reacquired ownership. Blattner and GE hired subcontractors for the work. GE hired C2 logistics, Plaintiff’s employer, to disassemble the old nacelles. Blattner thus neither employed Plaintiff nor had a contract with his employer.
Blattner argued that it owed Plaintiff no duty. Plaintiff countered that Blattner retained contractual control of the work, creating a duty. Blattner responded that since it didn’t have a contract with Plaintiff’s employer, Plaintiff couldn’t show that Blattner retained such control. Plaintiff didn’t dispute that Blattner had no direct relationship with C2 but instead “focus-ed] on the NextEra-Blattner repowering agreement—an agreement that [Plaintiff] did not file but said NextEra would submit for an in camera inspection based on the contract’s alleged confidentiality.” Plaintiff failed to produce the agreement in his summary judgment evidence, but managed to produce screenshotted excerpts of it purporting to show Blattner’s “complete control” of the worksite, together with a screenshot of Blattner’s safety manual (which specified fall protection measures).
But because Plaintiff didn’t attach the agreement and safety manual themselves to his summary-judgment evidence, the court had before only unauthenticated screenshots. Additionally, the court observed “we are being asked to construe the agreement’s paragraphs in isolation, including without having the agreement’s defined terms—notably “Labor,” “Work,” and “employees.” Plaintiff thus couldn’t show that GE and its subs were covered by the repowering agreement in the first place. He also failed to show that Blattner’s safety manual covered anyone else besides its own employees. “Based on the record before us,” the court concluded, “it is unclear whether it is even corre t to classify Blattner as theor a general contractor of the entire repowering project; the devil is in the contractual details that [Plaintiff] did not produce.” What is odd about this case is that nobody seemed to know whether the trial court actually reviewed the repowering agreement, nor did they request that the trial-court clerk include the unfiled agreement in the appellate record. Faced with that uncertainty, the court “must presume that the missing repowering agreement did not raise any fact issues that would have precluded the trial court’s granting Blattner’s no-evidence summary-judgment motion.”
Plaintiff would equally have failed in defeating Blattner’s traditional MSJ, since nothing he produced “demonstrate that requisite level of control over the operative details of C2’s work.” He attempted to argue that he raised a fact issue as actual (as opposed to contractual) control. But that would require evidence that Blattner retained “a right of supervision that the independent contractor [C2] is not entirely free to do the work in its own way.” As the court stated, “[f]or a duty to arise through exercising actual control over a job worksite—what is essentially a negligent undertaking—an affirmative course of action is required.” But even Plaintiff’s testimony acknowledged that he didn’t see any Blattner people at the worksite until after he was hurt, when they gave him first aid while awaiting the ambulance. Plaintiff also testified that two weeks prior to the accident, Blattner stopped work on his tower because he was unharnessed. The work resumed when C2 told the Blattner safety rep that a harness could’t be used because there was nothing to which to attach it.
None of this established actual control. It did establish that Plaintiff’s employer “controlled the disassembly work at each tower” without interference from Blattner,” which was “free to direct C2 on when and where it worked and to set minimal safety standards without becoming C2’s insurer for its negligent acts.” And, by the way, the testimony of Plaintiff’s “safety expert” about OSHA multi-employer directives concerning who is a “controlling entity” have no effect on Texas common law one way or the other. The trial court thus properly granted summary judgment.
