Battistone v. Benedetti
| Decision Date | 25 April 1956 |
| Citation | 385 Pa. 163,122 A.2d 536 |
| Parties | Dom BATTISTONE v. Rudy BENEDETTI and Ernest Reed, as Individuals and as Partners, t/a The Dependable Furnace Company and Donald M. Vidale; and J. W. Proie, a/k/a Joseph W. Proie, an Individual and t/a Air Tron Company. Appeals of J. W. PROIE, a/k/a Joseph W. Proie. Appeal of J. W. PROIE, a/k/a Joseph W. Proie, t/a Air Tron Company. Appeal of Donald M. VIDALE. Appeal of Rudy BENEDETTI and Ernest Reed, t/a Dependable Furnace Company. Appeal of Rudy BENEDETTI. Appeal of Ernest REED. |
| Court | Pennsylvania Supreme Court |
John E. Costello, Charleroi, Andrew E. Sheridan, James McIntyre, Pittsburgh, for appellants.
George I. Bloom, Milton D. Rosenberg, Bloom, Bloom & Yard, John C. Rogers, Charles G. Sweet, Sweet & Rogers, Washington, for appellee.
Before STERN, C. J., and JONES, BELL, MUSMANNO and ARNOLD, JJ.
On November 10, 1950, at 3:30 in the morning, in Scenery Hill, Washington County, a night club building in the final processes of construction and not yet ready for occupancy was wrecked and completely destroyed by explosion and fire. The plaintiff-owner of the building attributed the cause of the explosion to faulty installation of twin furnaces in the basement by the defendants, Rudy Benedetti and Ernest Reed, Donald M. Vidale, and J. W. Proie, and he accordingly brought suit in trespass against them.
The jury returned a verdict of $51,000 in favor of the plaintiff against all the defendants and a verdict of $3,500 in favor of Benedetti and Reed in their counterclaim against the plaintiff. All the defendants appealed and here ask for judgment n. o. v. or a new trial.
It was in September, 1950, that the defendants, Benedetti and Reed, trading as the Dependable Furnace Company, entered into an agreement with Battistone to install in his new building two Niagara Oil Furnaces, the furnaces to be obtained through J. W. Proie, trading as Air Tron Company, distributors for the Niagara Company. Donald M. Vidale, engineer for Air Tron, was present at the time of the discussion between Battistone and the partners, Benedetti and Reed. Battistone testified that Vidale agreed----
'on what kind of system would be the best up there and it would need two furnaces and it would cost $5,100; that is including all the work and that he would see, that he would supervise the job and see everything was done right and that the Air-tron was the distributing company for the Niagara Company in Cleveland.'
Benedetti and Reed began the work of installation about October 15, 1950 and completed it on November 9, 1950. Vidale was present and participated in the work on three different days. He was present also on the night of November 9th when the furnaces were lighted for the first time. As the apparatus warmed up, it gave off fumes and hissing noises which caused Frank Agotti (the general contractor) to exclaim: 'What are you tuying to do, blow us up?' Vidale replied: 'Don't worry, everything will be all right.' Both Battistone and Agotti then said to Vidale that if the furnaces were to operate all night, an attendant should be on duty to watch over them and the building. To this, Vidale replied: 'You don't have to worry about nothing * * * those automatics will take care of it.'
Everyone departed about 10 p. m., and at 3:30 the next morning the building blasted apart in an explosion which twisted girders, sheared off a chimney, hurled bricks and a window frame 150 feet and catapulted at least one concrete block a distance of 75 feet. When the force of the explosion and ensuing fire had spent itself the building was a wreck and total loss.
Since no human eye witnessed the precise agency which wrought the building's doom, the plaintiff, in charging the defendants with responsibility for his losses, resorted to circumstantial and expert evidence to reconstruct the story of the disaster. It was shown that the 2,000-gallon tank in the yard, which fed the twin furnaces with oil, discharged 325 gallons in nine hours (the expired time between the lighting of the furnaces and the explosion), whereas the normal consumption for that period would not have surpassed an expenditurd of 27 gallons. An investigation made the day after the explosion showed that the oil pump and the door of the right-hand furnace (the left-hand furnace was not damaged) had been blown from the furnace to the opposite wall of the furnace room. Battistone, Frank Agotti, Jr. (son of the general contractor), and Russel Smiley, carpenter, all testified that the copper tubing which carried the oil from the outside tank into the furnaces was not provided with check valves. The absence of this device was regarded by Alex Kalinsky, mechanical engineer and heating expert, as of extreme significance. When he was asked: 'Primarily, then, what was the cause of the explosion and the resulting fire?' he replied: 'Lack of check valves in the supply line.' He testified also:
'Assuming what you have told me and from my examination of the premises, the electrodes, as I have brought up before, there occurred a violent explosion in the furnace and on the right due to the oil pump not having a sufficient supply of oil spraying into the combustion chamber a mixture of oil and air that did immediately touch the electrode points.'
He explained that it was his opinion that the supply and oil lines suffered a rupture which caused oil to flow to the floor of the furnace room, that the volatile part of the oil evaported, causing an oil-air mixture which permeated the furnace room and spread into other parts of the building, and that when the thermostat called for heat it set off a spark which ignited the oil-air mixture, precipitating the explosion.
In their brief on this appeal, counsel for the defendants maintain that the three expert witnesses called by them demonstrated that the furnaces were in to way connected with the explosion. But to arrive at this conclusion, they must repudiate the testimony of the obviously unpartisan witness, the Deputy Fire Marshal, W. J. Heur, who inspected the ruins of the Battistone building only three hours after the explosion. Mr. Heur, who was under the jurisdiction of the State Police, declared that his investigation revealed to him that the explosion occurred in the furnace room. It is impossible to read the 450-page printed record of this case and come to any conclusion other than that the furnaces were...
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