Bergagna v. Department of Labor & Industries

Batista Bergagna, a coal miner sixty-one years of age, suffered a heart attack while at work in a mine operated by the Cle Elum Coal Company. Succeeding the attack, he walked unassisted some two hundred feet up a fourteen per cent slope to the mouth of the mine, and died within a few minutes thereafter.

Orlena Bergagna, the workman’s widow, filed a claim for pension with the department of labor and industries. The claim was rejected by the supervisor of industrial insurance for the assigned reasons that there was no proof of an injury to the decedent during the course of employment, and that…