The subcontractor had already been written up for the same problem - multiple times
A Washington appeals court upheld $132,000 in penalties against a general contractor whose supervisors were on-site while workers framed rooftops without fall protection.
DHI is the commercial division of DR Horton, a housing construction company. DHI does not perform building work itself - it hires and supervises subcontractors. For its Rainier Ridge project, a 307-unit development of apartments and rental casitas in Puyallup, Washington, DHI brought on Northwest Framing to handle the framing.
In August 2022, an L&I compliance inspector doing routine stop-by checks noticed personnel working on trusses at three separate houses without fall protection. He stopped and took photos.
The problems ran deeper than missing harnesses. There were no anchor points installed anywhere for workers to tie off. None of the three houses had a written fall protection work plan. One worker was operating a nail gun without eye protection. And DHI could not produce records for six of the previous twelve weeks of required safety inspections.
The Washington Department of Labor and Industries (L&I) issued a citation with five violations under the Washington Industrial Safety and Health Act (WISHA), classified four as willful and serious, and assessed $132,000 in penalties.
DHI appealed, arguing the court should adopt the federal OSHA framework, which the company said recognises that a general contractor’s duty is not the same as the subcontractor’s obligation to its own workers.
The court declined. Under Washington law, set down by the state Supreme Court, a general contractor holds primary responsibility for the safety of all workers on the site - including subcontractor employees. That duty is not secondary.
DHI also argued it had no knowledge of the violations because its superintendents were inside the job trailer, which had no windows facing the houses in question. The court accepted DHI lacked actual knowledge. But all three houses were visible from just outside the trailer, on a regular workday when superintendents were present. One superintendent testified that supervisors spent roughly 70 to 80 percent of each day doing field checks. And DHI had previously written up Northwest Framing employees for fall safety concerns on multiple occasions.
A reasonable check, the court held, would have caught the violations. DHI had constructive knowledge - meaning the violations were readily observable and the company should have known.
The willfulness finding stuck too. DHI had been cited before for the same fall safety standards. It knew Northwest Framing had a track record. Yet on the day of inspection, there were no anchors, no work plans, and exposed workers at three houses simultaneously. Six weeks of walk-around records were missing. Truss work had started the day before.
For HR and safety professionals managing multi-employer sites, the takeaway is practical: a general contractor cannot sit in the trailer and claim ignorance when violations are visible from the car park - especially when the subcontractor’s safety record is already flagged internally.
The decision was issued by the Washington State Court of Appeals, Division II, on October 6, 2026, and published on November 10, 2026.
