Beattie v. Edge Moor Bridge Works

• Decision Date: 30 March 1901
• Parties: BEATTIE v. EDGE MOOR BRIDGE WORKS.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Southern District of New York

109 F. 233

BEATTIE v. EDGE MOOR BRIDGE WORKS.

United States Circuit Court, S.D. New York.

March 30, 1901

Thomas P. Wickes, for plaintiff.

Carl A De Gersdorff, for defendant.

WHEELER District Judge.

The defendant was putting in a tier of false work upon piles, in bents, for an iron bridge. A traveler, weighing upwards of 30 tons, moving on a track on top, was used for raising timbers and materials to place. The plan of the structure required longitudinal X-braces between the bents to keep them from tipping over lengthwise of the work. None had been put on, or were being put on, between the sixth and seventh and seventh and eighth bents. The intestate was a well-experienced workman employed about the work upon and between these bents. The traveler was run out on the track resting upon these bents, and put to work. The bents went down under its weight. The piles under the eighth bent were broken, and the intestate was killed. There was evidence that he, under direction of a superior, pulled a pin that fastened a stringer between the bents just before the traveler fell, and that something seemed to then give way; also that he did not pull the pin, and that there were other stringers sufficient so that nothing gave way because of such act. The principal rulings of the trial were made upon the idea that the intestate was entitled to a reasonably safe place to work in free from dangers of defects in the structure itself for want of fit materials, or of completion not then in process at that place, making it unsafe for the uses to which it was put, as if it had been completed, by those in charge for the defendant, who, as to this, would represent the defendant and not be fellow servants with the intestate; and that the intestate would not be bound to know the effect upon the safety of the structure in all its parts of doing work upon it in particular places, as he was directed. In taking exceptions to the charge, and in argument upon this motion for a new trial, the defendant's counsel appears to have understood it to have been stated to the jury that 'the defendants were not intending to put on any more braced,' and that the intestate 'did not appear to have been a skilled bridge builder. ' The expressions used were not intended to be, and do not now seem warrantably to have been, so understood. That as to X-braces, in this respect, was in these words: 'The structure that was being built was nearly...