Besser Co. v. Hansen
| Decision Date | 28 February 1992 |
| Docket Number | No. 910572,910572 |
| Parties | , Prod.Liab.Rep. (CCH) P 13,126 BESSER COMPANY v. Raymond F. HANSEN. Record |
| Court | Virginia Supreme Court |
Allan S. Reynolds, Norfolk (S. Lawrence Dumville, Reynolds, Smith & Winters, Breeden, MacMillan & Green, on briefs), for appellant.
Edward F. Halloran, Virginia Beach (Robert S. Brewbaker, Jr., Rilee, Cantor & Russell, Richmond, on brief), for appellee.
Present: All the Justices.
This product liability case involves issues of a manufacturer's tort and implied warranty liability arising out of a third party's alleged misuse of the manufacturer's product.
On March 12, 1987, Raymond F. Hansen, an employee at a concrete block manufacturing plant of Tarmac-Lone Star Company (Tarmac) in Chesapeake, was injured in his operation of a "transfer car" manufactured by the Besser Company (Besser). Hansen sued Besser and recovered a judgment upon a jury's verdict for one million dollars. Besser appeals.
We state the evidence and the reasonable inferences that can be drawn therefrom in the light most favorable to Hansen, the party who prevailed at trial. Oden v. Salch, 237 Va. 525, 527, 379 S.E.2d 346, 348 (1989); Virginia & Md. R.R. v. White, 228 Va. 140, 142, 319 S.E.2d 755, 756 (1984).
After Tarmac's cement blocks were formed, they were loaded on racks that held eight tons of the "green" blocks. The racks, equipped with flanged steel wheels, moved on railroad tracks.
Automatic coupling devices, supplied and maintained by Tarmac, were located in the center of the lower edges of the front and back of each rack. When the fronts and backs of the racks were pushed together, the racks were designed to couple automatically when a hook on the rear rack rolled over a bumper bar on the front rack and dropped down after clearing the bar.
Each loaded rack was hauled to one of four long, narrow rooms called "preset" rooms. When 10 loaded racks accumulated in the preset rooms, the coupled racks were pulled forward from the preset rooms along railroad tracks installed on the flat top of Besser's transfer car into one of the four "autoclaves" opposite each preset room.
The autoclave was a cylindrical, high-pressure, steel chamber 10 feet in diameter and 110 feet long with tracks in the bottom. The green blocks were then rapidly cured in the autoclaves under intense heat and pressure.
Besser's electrically powered transfer car (the car) replaced a previous transfer car that had worn out. The front of Besser's car was considered as that part facing the autoclaves, and the rear was that part adjacent to the preset rooms. The sides of the car were considered right or left as they would appear to an operator standing at the rear of the car facing forward.
The car pulled the racks along its surface by means of a "shuttle" or ram installed between its railroad tracks. This shuttle was a steel platform connected to a large, screw-type, electrically driven shaft or extended worm gear.
The rotation of this worm gear clockwise or counterclockwise caused the shuttle to go forward or backward between the front and back ends of the car. At each end of the shuttle was a "ratchet-like" device called a "dog" that, when raised by a cam, successively engaged a series of hooks in the center of the bottom of each rack. When a dog and a rack hook were engaged, the rack was pulled forward or backward in the desired direction across the car's surface as the electrically driven worm gear rotated.
The pulling tension kept the dog and hook engaged until the shuttle reached the limit of its movement. At that point, the worm gear stopped rotating, released the pulling tension, and the dog dropped from the hook in the bottom of the rack. Because there were no dogs engaged in one of the hooks on the bottom of the rack, the rack movement was temporarily interrupted while the worm gear reversed.
Upon the return of the worm gear and shuttle to their original position, the worm gear resumed its original direction of rotation, re-engaged a dog and the next hook in the bottom of the rack, and pulled the rack through the next cycle in its desired direction of travel. The rack moved two miles an hour on successive cycles as it crossed the car's surface. It took several cycles for each rack to cross the surface of the car.
A control box four feet tall, 10 inches wide, and six feet long, was mounted with its length running along the right side of the car. This control box was located near the rear of the car, leaving just enough room for an operator to stand behind the box and control all shuttle movements by utilizing switches on a panel.
The panel was located on the rear of the control box facing away from the front of the autoclave. Thus, the panel was positioned at a 90-degree angle to the side of the transfer car and could not be seen by anyone who stood at the front of the car.
The operator activated the forward and backward movement of the shuttle by pulling out a button on the panel. If he desired to stop the shuttle movement, the operator merely depressed the "mushroom" button or stop switch. Besser provided, but Tarmac did not use, a "lock-out" key which, if turned and removed, prevented anyone but the operator from pulling out the mushroom button to resume operation.
Once the operator put the shuttle in operation, he controlled it manually by turning a three-way switch to the left from its "off" position in the center to a "hand" position. Then, he pushed a "joy stick" on the panel in the desired direction of movement of the racks across the tracks. The joy stick returned to a "neutral" or "off" position whenever the operator released it.
When the operator desired to have the shuttle move the racks automatically, he turned the three-way switch to the right from its "off" position to a position marked "auto." Upon doing so, a red light located to the immediate right of the three-way switch was automatically activated to warn the operator that the shuttle was in its automatic mode. This warning was necessary because the shuttle continued to move the racks as it went through its cycles in the automatic mode.
The operator stopped the shuttle from moving the racks while in its automatic mode by turning the three-way switch to the left from the "auto" position to the "off" position. He could also stop the shuttle's automatic pulling movement by pressing an emergency mushroom or stop switch located just to the left of the three-way switch.
The car itself traveled between the preset rooms and autoclaves and out into the block storage areas on railroad tracks that were installed in a long two-foot deep pit, approximately 13 feet wide, that ran at a 90-degree angle to the track on the car's platform. At each end of the pit were intersecting tracks on the same level as that of the car's top.
Besser minimized the risk of the rack wheels running off the rails as they passed over the gap between the aligned car rails and the preset room rails by constructing the car so that the ends of the rails almost touched. However, a similar minimal space could not be provided between the car rails and those of the autoclaves. This was because the autoclaves' steel doors, when closed, would lack sufficient clearance to properly seal the autoclaves if their rail ends were flush with the fronts of the autoclaves.
To bridge the required clearance gap of almost three feet, Tarmac provided and maintained a collapsible "bridge," consisting of rails, hinged on the ends of the autoclave rails and braced by supporting steel "legs," when in position, to carry the racks across the gap. Nevertheless, because of Tarmac's poor maintenance, there were frequent derailings at or near the bridge as racks were being loaded or unloaded from the autoclaves.
To minimize the effect of such derailings, the car operator put the shuttle in the automatic mode and left the operator's position in front of the panel. The operator then stood on the floor of the pit near the right front side of the transfer car to watch the rack wheels as they approached and crossed the bridge. If the operator observed a wheel run off the track, he immediately went to the rear of the control box, reached up, and turned the three-way switch from "auto" to "off."
After the cement blocks were cured in the autoclave, the operator, using the car's manual control, pulled one coupled rack out of the autoclave for a sufficient distance to permit the rack to be uncoupled from the rack in front of it. The car then carried the uncoupled rack from the front of the autoclave to the intersecting tracks at the ends of the pit. There, the cured blocks were off-loaded and taken to storage areas.
The automatic uncoupling device on the replaced transfer car no longer worked. Accordingly, the car operator had to step between the transfer car and the rack to uncouple them. Because the hook of one rack was latched over the bar coupling on the next rack, after manually lifting the hook, the car operator placed broken pieces of concrete block under the hook to keep it from falling back and recoupling the racks. After doing so, he remounted the car and, using its manual control, backed the uncoupled rack from its preceding rack.
Besser agreed to design and build an automatic uncoupling device on its replacement car that could be used with Tarmac's properly maintained racks and tracks. The device was a block of steel welded on the shuttle with an appropriate cam that would contact the cam on the bottom of the rack hook. The cam on the block of steel was designed to contact a cam on the bottom of the rack hook each time the shuttle went underneath the coupling between the racks and to lift the rack hook from the bumper bar on the next rack. The steel bar on the shuttle was designed to keep the rack hook up until the shuttle movement separated the...
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