Cline v. Department of Labor and Industries
Decision Date | 18 July 1957 |
Docket Number | No. 34186,34186 |
Citation | 313 P.2d 687,50 Wn.2d 614 |
Parties | Gladys Marie CLINE, Respondent, v. The DEPARTMENT OF LABOR AND INDUSTRIES, Defendant, Crown Zellerbach Corporation, Employer-Appellant. |
Court | Washington Supreme Court |
Holman, Mickelwait, Marion, Black & Perkins, Fred S. Merritt, and Richard E. Walker, Seattle, for appellant.
Howard V. Doherty, Port Angeles, for respondent.
On September 9, 1953, Earl W. Cline died of a heart attack while working with a boom crew for Crown Zellerbach Corporation. On October 13, 1953, the widow filed her claim for a pension. The department of labor and industries rejected the claim on October 16, 1953, and the widow appealed to the board of industrial insurance appeals, which, after holding hearings, sustained the order of the department. Whereupon, the widow appealed to the superior court of Clallam county, where the jury returned a verdict reversing the order of the board. The employer has appealed to this court.
The attack occurred about ten o'clock in the morning, two and one-half hours after Cline, returning from a four-day holiday, had reported for work. He was fifty-three years of age at the time of his death, had been a boom man for some nine years, and had never complained of ill health. He was about five feet six inches tall and weighed around two hundred forty pounds. On the day of his death, he had been engaged in his usual activities of moving logs into position for booming and preventing jams; the work required his using a pike pole, a peavey, and a ten-pound sledge hammer. In the performance of these duties, he had occasion to pull a small cable across the river. Shortly before 10:00 a. m. on the morning of the attack, he pulled this cable up the river a hundred or two hundred feet. The cable became kinked or snagged, requiring Cline to walk back to the point of difficulty. He remedied the trouble and returned to the dump area at the end of the cable. He was then seen to walk unsteadily to the side of the river bank, sit down, reach for his left chest with his right hand, and then slump forward. He died within a few minutes.
The court instructed the jury:
'In order to sustain her claim for benefits under the Workman's Compensation Act (RCW 51.04.010 et seq.) as widow of the deceased workman the claimant must prove by a preponderance of the evidence * * * that a strain or over-exertion in the course of his employment caused or proximately contributed to the workman's death: Otherwise expressed, you are to decide whether the workman's death was due to the ordinary progression of a diseased condition independently of the alleged injury or was the death of Earl Cline caused or proximately contributed to by strain or exertion put forth by the deceased which in his then existing bodily condition brought about his death and without which physical strain and exertion then so exerted the death would not have occurred at the time it did occur.
'An accident within the terms of the Workman's Compensation Act need not be a blow or wound but may be an exertion or strain beyond the limit of his physical capacity.'
No error has been assigned to this or other instructions given, and they are, therefore, the law of the case. Hatzenbuhler v. Harrison, Wash., 306 P.2d 745; Sunset Oil Co. v. Vertner, 34 Wash.2d 268, 208 P.2d 906.
The only question before this court is whether there was substantial evidence in the record to support the jury's finding that the exertion experienced...
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