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How much are your legs worth?
$1 million apiece? $5 million?
It's not a ridiculous question. Not for Scott Skirpan.
Skirpan, 50, a softhearted ex-Marine from Easton, lost both his legs three years ago in a gruesome industrial accident at a Northampton County landfill.
This week in Philadelphia Common Pleas Court, the firm that owns the landfill, and Caterpillar Inc. - which made the bulldozer that crushed his legs like toothpicks - agreed to pay Skirpan a whopping $16.25 million to settle his negligence lawsuit in midtrial.
It is one of the largest settlements in Pennsylvania history for a single-victim personal-injury case, lawyers said.
But Skirpan, a cement-finisher, says he'd rather be a working stiff with four limbs than a millionaire who can't walk.
"I'd rather have the legs," he said.
He's lucky to be alive.
On May 1, 2006, five days into his job as a truck spotter at the Chrin Sanitary Landfill, a massive track loader backed around a pile of garbage and ran him over.
"I figured he knew what he was doing," he said of the bulldozer operator. "I was standing there getting ready to back in a truck, and all of a sudden I turned around and this CAT is right on my tail. It was right there, and I couldn't jump or move or anything. It just plowed me over and sucked me under."
Skirpan's attorney argued that Chrin Brothers, which owns the landfill, had failed to train their client, and that the Caterpillar didn't have adequate rear vision.
"They threw him in there in the most dangerous job at the landfill," said lawyer Slade McLaughlin, of the Beasley Firm. "No one trained him."
Skirpan, who dialed 9-1-1 himself, said that the driver and other workers offered no assistance.
"My leg is gone. Please, please help me now . . . Tell my daughter I love her," he told the 9-1-1 dispatcher, as blood poured from his femoral artery.
"He's sitting there bleeding to death in a trash pile, and the people were just not coming over," McLaughlin said. "For 12 minutes with his legs cut off, he's talking on 9-1-1."
Attorneys for Chrin Brothers and Caterpillar did not return phone calls seeking comment yesterday.
Skirpan was airlifted to St. Luke's Hospital Trauma Center, arriving in cardiac arrest. Doctors told his wife, Carol, that he probably wouldn't make it.
"The consensus at that point was that if he somehow miraculously survived this ordeal, he would probably be brain-dead or have major brain damage, since he was clinically dead and without oxygen during CPR," Dr. James Cipolla wrote in a report submitted for the trial.
Skirpan returned to the operating table 11 times - "It seemed like he was in surgery every other day," Cipolla wrote - and developed serious infections due to the garbage that had been crushed into the gaping wounds. Ultimately, surgeons had to remove his right leg and part of his right hip, and most of his left leg.
"I coded out twice - ya know, died twice," said Skirpan, who has an 8-year-old daughter and a 19-year-old son.
He's a roll-with-the-punches type of guy. Getting around his split-level house and into cars is physically exhausting, and he has experienced flashbacks and phantom pain. But he still manages to swim, lift weights and ride a three-wheel hand-powered bicycle.
"I cruise that," he said. "I gotta get back out there and lose some weight."
The soon-to-be millionaire doesn't have any grand plans for spending the money.
"Just try to enjoy the rest of my life," he said, adding that he'll start with a relaxing vacation and a new home - one that's easier for a double-amputee to navigate.
"Rancher," he said. "One floor."
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