Cuozzo v. Clyde S.S. Co.
| Decision Date | 10 April 1916 |
| Parties | CUOZZO v. CLYDE S. S. CO. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Report from Superior Court, Suffolk County; Wait, Judge.
Action by Antonio Cuozzo against the Clyde Steamship Company. On report, after verdict for defendant. Judgment for defendant on the verdict.
J. W. Pickering and Jos. Vecchioni, both of Boston, for plaintiff.
Blodgett, Jones, Burnham & Bingham, of Boston (Stephen R. Jones, of Boston, of counsel), for defendant.
The plaintiff, a longshoreman in the employ of the defendant, on August 26, 1909, was unloading barrels containing resin from a steamship over a fixed permanent platform and across a movable skid or toe piece to the street. Several men were engaged in the work, and the barrels were unloaded by means of ordinary two-wheeled trucks. The men worked from two to five or ten feet apart. The skid extended from the platform to the street. It was about six feet wide and about three feet long, and was constructed from two-inch planks.
Just before the accident, one Di Mambro, a fellow workman, preceded the plaintiff over the platform. As his (Di Mambro's) truck passed over the skid, the barrel upon the truck tipped off; and the plaintiff, who was about ten feet behind Di Mambro, upon the permanent platform, saw what had happened. The plaintiff then started to haul his truck across the skid when one of the planks broke and the right wheel of the truck went through it. The plaintiff's left foot also went through the planking as he was trying to extricate the truck, and the barrel and truck fell upon him, causig the injuries which he sustained.
The case comes to this court upon a report made by a judge of the superior court. It appears from the report that the plaintiffhad been employed in the same kind of work for the defendant four or five days a week for a period of two or three years before the accident; that ‘the work was always carried on in the same manner as at the time of the accident and was always over the same permanent platform and the same movable skid or toe piece at the end of the platform.’ At the time of the accident the skid was decayed and old, and also rotten from water. The plaintiff testified that ‘he had known of this condition all the time that he had worked there and saw that this skid was there and at the same place’; that The plaintiff introduced other evidence to show that the skid had been there for a long time and that ‘it looked bad, looked all rotten out.’
This case is governed by principles of law that are well settled. The plaintiff, by his contract of employment, assumed all the obvious risks of the business in which he was engaged. While it is the duty of an employer to furnish his employé with reasonably safe tools and appliances and to furnish him with a reasonably safe place in which to perform his work, still if the tools and appliances so furnished are defective and unsuitable, or the place where he is put to work is dangerous, and he fully appreciates and understands such defects and dangers, and is injured, he is held to have assumed such risks and cannot...
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...392, 396, 104 N. E. 956;Ashton v. Boston & Maine Railroad, 222 Mass. 65, 70, 109 N. E. 820, L. R. A. 1916B, 1281;Cuozzo v. Clyde Steamship Co., 223 Mass. 521, 524, 112 N. E. 215. The evident dangers incident to a roofing job of this kind afford no evidence of the defendant's negligence. Mou......
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