A mishap at the Elijah Smith Building on Main Street has sparked a lawsuit by a federal employee and added one more item to the list of woes faced by property manager SNC-Lavalin.

Linda Hill, a program officer with Health Canada, filed a lawsuit this month against SNC-Lavalin O&M, along with its parent companies, a Whitehorse construction company and one of its employees.

Hill is suing for alleged negligence and breach of duty to reasonable care after being struck on the head by a falling hunk of concussion-inducing lumber in 2012.

Hill was walking on the Elijah Smith property on April 10 of that year "when a piece of wood was dropped or fell from the fourth balcony or, in the alternative, the roof of the property,” striking her and "causing injury.”

The suit attributes the incident to "the negligence of the defendants.” It accuses them of "failing to take any adequate precautions to ensure that the wood would not and could not fall or be dropped....”

Ketza Construction Corp., a local building company, had been contracted by SNC-Lavalin and the federal government — whose Whitehorse offices are based at Elijah Smith — to carry out renovations on the building's fourth-floor balcony.

Ketza did not "train or instruct its employees ... adequately or at all regarding the handling of wood,” the suit states.

Alternately, the company is "vicariously liable for the "negligence of its employee,” according to the statement of claim.

The employee remains anonymous, listed in the suit as John Doe.

SNC-Lavalin was supposedly "in breach of its duty to the plaintiff (by) failing to take reasonable care to see that the plaintiff would be reasonably safe when entering and exiting the property.”

The three subsidiaries of the embattled multinational listed in the suit also allegedly neglected "to properly supervise the area where Ketza was carrying out work.”

Hill sustained physical injuries as a result, as well as financial losses, she claimed.

She suffered a concussion and after-effects like headaches.

She continues to endure "pain, suffering, loss of enjoyment of life, permanent disability and loss of earnings” as well as ongoing medical treatment, she said.

Hill is claiming financial damages and legal costs.

She could not be reached for comment.

Debra Fendrick, the defendants' lawyer, is on holidays and unavailable for comment.

An SNC subsidiary, SNC-Lavalin ProFac, bid successfully for the property management contract for the Elijah Smith Building in 2009.

SNC received a $1.5-billion property management contract for 319 federal buildings across Canada in 2004.

The construction conglomerate has offices in roughly 30 nations and operates in more than half the countries in the world.

The recent lawsuit is one more pinprick in the painfully acupunctured side of the Montreal-based engineering giant, implicated in corruption allegations in Libya over the past several years.

Accusations last month about the company's close ties to deposed Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi came on the heels of claims that, up until the nation's 2011 civil war along with Western military intervention, multiple senior executives had a long history of hobnobbing with the Gadhafi regime and lobbying through favours, junkets and entertainment for family members.

One claim, filed in court documents in Montreal, suggests the company put the wife of a Gadhafi son on its payroll during the civil war, despite UN economic sanctions.