“Basically, it looked like scrambled eggs with a lot of barbecue sauce.”
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Those are the words a man partially blinded in a workplace accident used to describe what he saw when he used a mirror to see his injury.
Craig Kenneth Johnson suffered a penetrating wound to his left eye after attempting to change brake pads on a car using the wrong tools in 2006.
Justice Margaret Sidis ordered the Canberra smash repair company pay Mr Johnson $852,034.11 in a judgment handed down in the ACT Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The court heard Mr Johnson was using long nosed pliers to remove a spring from a brake assembly at the Belconnen business in April 2006 when the tool slipped from the end of the spring and struck his left eye.
When he stood up he felt pain in the left side of his head and knew from his bosses' reaction that there was a serious problem.
He was taken to Calvary Hospital, where he underwent surgery to save the eyeball.
It was during his three-day stay at Calvary Hospital that he viewed the damage in a mirror.
Mr Johnson was transferred to Sydney Eye Hospital, where he stayed for eight days and received word that his eye had been saved.
But the accident caused vision impairment and he would suffer ongoing problems relating to depth perception and double vision.
In the years after the accident, the plaintiff developed depression and an alcohol problem.
He told the court he became self-conscious about the appearance of his eye as it sat at an angle and had a misshapen pupil.
At the time of the injury, he was 22 and was in the third year of a four-year panel beating apprenticeship.
He finished his trade qualification as a panel beater in 2008.
But he told the court his vision problems meant he had problems lining up panels, joining wires, soldering, welding and grinding.
Forefront Automotive Industries, trading as Fuller Brothers Body Works, admitted liability and that the injury was serious and had caused significantly impaired vision in that eye.
But the company argued about the extent to which the plaintiff's income earning capacity was affected by his injury.
Justice Sidis found that, in changing the brake pads of the vehicle, Mr Johnson was undertaking work for which he was not trained, was not using appropriate equipment, he was not supervised and he was not wearing eye protection.