Nabors

INTRODUCTION

Danny Nabors petitions for review of the opinion and decision after reconsideration of the Workers’ Compensation Appeals Board (Board), which affirmed the award of a workers’ compensation judge (WCJ). Nabors challenges the Board’s permanent disability apportionment formula.

BACKGROUND

In May 1996, Nabors sustained industrial injury to his low back and lower extremities while employed by Piedmont Lumber Co. as a foreman, lumber stacker and forklift driver, resulting in an August 2001 stipulated award of $42,476 based on 49 percent permanent disability. Thereafter, while working for Piedmont as a mill supervisor, he sustained injury to the same body parts cumulative to August 19, 2002. After a hearing, the WCJ found the cumulative injury caused 31 percent of Nabors’s permanent disability and awarded him $22,610. The Board granted Nabors’s petition for reconsideration, and affirmed the award in an en banc opinion and decision. This timely writ petition followed.

DISCUSSION

In his opinion on decision, the WCJ explained that in apportioning disability between Nabors’s two industrial injuries, he followed the rationale of Fuentes v. Workers’ Comp. Appeals Bd.…