Henry Ericsson Co. v. United States, 44614.
| Decision Date | 01 October 1945 |
| Docket Number | No. 44614.,44614. |
| Citation | 62 F. Supp. 312,104 Ct. Cl. 397 |
| Parties | HENRY ERICSSON CO. v. UNITED STATES. |
| Court | U.S. Claims Court |
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Herman J. Galloway, of Washington, D. C. (King & King and Harry D. Ruddiman, all of Washington, D. C., on the brief), for plaintiff.
Currell Vance, of Washington, D. C. and Francis M. Shea, Asst. Atty. Gen., for defendant.
Before WHALEY, Chief Justice, and LITTLETON, WHITAKER, JONES, and MADDEN, Judges.
The plaintiff on September 3, 1936, made a contract with the United States Public Works Administration for the construction of the superstructure of the north sector of the Julia C. Lathrop Homes in Chicago, Illinois, for a consideration of $2,097,600. The contract obligated the plaintiff to complete the work within 365 days after the receipt of notice to proceed. Notice was received on September 23, 1936, which fixed the completion date as September 22, 1937.
The plaintiff made a plan for the orderly and economical performance of its work. It was to build 17 buildings, containing in all 484 apartments with a total of 1690 rooms. Eleven buildings were to be 3 story buildings, five 2 story and one, the administration building, one story. The outside foundation walls had already been built. The sequence of the work in each building was first to place the interior foundation columns and the concrete slabs of the first floors which were to rest on the foundation walls and columns; then build up the brick exterior walls backed with tile, and the interior partitions; then place the interior columns to support the second floor and pour the concrete slab of that floor, resting it on the walls and columns; then build up the exterior walls to the next floor, and so on to the concrete slab roof, covered with insulation, paper and tar, and the parapets and penthouse on top of it. Plastering, wood finishing, and painting were to be done when the buildings were enclosed.
The plaintiff planned to move its gangs of labor of the various trades, its machines, and its form lumber, from one building to the next, while waiting for the concrete of each floor to dry sufficiently to permit the placing of the next tier of walls on that floor. It planned to carry seven buildings along in that sequence. But it was seriously delayed, almost at the outset, by the Government's failure to furnish full size drawings showing how the stone trim for the front entrances of the buildings was to be shaped. Without these drawings the plaintiff could not prepare its shop drawings for the manufacture of the stone; the stone could not be manufactured; and the plaintiff could not complete the exterior walls of even the first floor of the buildings, nor any work coming after that in sequence. Though it was obvious when the contract was made that the full sized drawings would be needed even before the work began, in order to enable the plaintiff to obtain the stone by the time it would be needed, the first of them arrived on October 30, fifty-seven days after the date of the contract and thirty-seven days after the plaintiff had been directed to proceed with the work. When the first full size drawings were received they were for only a part of the buildings, the buildings they related to were not contiguous, and the drawings were incomplete even as to some of the buildings to which they related. The plaintiff had tried in the meantime to avoid some of the delay by improvised procedures but was not permitted to do so.
We have found that as a consequence of the defendant's delay in furnishing the full sized drawings, the plaintiff was delayed forty-seven days in completing its work. The proved damages resulting from this delay were the costs of job and main office overhead; the cost of having its machinery tied up on the job; the cost of additional form lumber which the plaintiff was obliged to buy because its plan of work was disrupted; and the cost of furnishing heat to the buildings for a period at the end of the contract, after the time when the plaintiff would have had the job completed and turned over to the Government, but for the delay.
The completion of the job was further delayed by the failure of the Government to have steam available for the cleaning and testing of the pipes and radiators installed by the plaintiff. The boilers for the heating system were in the south sector of the project, built by another contractor. The steam was brought from the boilers by mains to the plaintiff's sector, and was there transmitted to the equipment installed by the plaintiff. The contract provided that the steam should be turned into the equipment installed by the plaintiff, first to clean it, and then to test it. But the steam could not be turned in until electricity was available to operate the stokers at the power plant and the motors in the vacuum pumps on the steam lines. The plaintiff was ready for the steam tests about September 13, 1937, or would have been except for unreasonable delay by the defendant in making up its mind that electric wire heavier than that specified would be required to operate the pumps. But no steam was available until October 13 because the public utility company which was to supply the electricity did not connect its lines to the project until October 12. We have found that the reason it did not do so was because the Government had not signed a contract with the utility company arranging for the service. The Government says that this finding is based upon hearsay testimony. The testimony was hearsay, but it was not objected to, and the Government had ample opportunity to prove the true facts if they were different from the testimony. Hence our finding is based not only on the hearsay testimony, but upon the corroborative fact that it stands uncontradicted. For the Government to delay the completion of the project for 17 days, as we have found, by failing, without explanation, to make arrangements with the public utility company for...
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