Mathis v. Lukens Steel Co.

• Decision Date: 15 September 1964
• Citation: 203 A.2d 482,415 Pa. 262
• Parties: Wallace MATHIS, Appellant, v. LUKENS STEEL COMPANY.
• Court: Pennsylvania Supreme Court

203 A.2d 482

415 Pa. 262

Wallace MATHIS, Appellant, v. LUKENS STEEL COMPANY.

Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.

September 15, 1964.

G. Clinton Fogwell, Jr., West Chester, for appellant.

Joseph F. Harvey, West Chester, for appellee.

Before BELL, C. J., and MUSMANNO, JONES, COHEN, EAGEN O'BRIEN and ROBERTS, JJ.

MUSMANNO, Justice.

The Kulzer Company, an independent contractor roofing and metal concern operating in Chester County, contracted with the Lukens Steel Company, to install on the roof of a building of the steel company, known as the Sodium Hydrate building in Coatesville two ventilators, each weighing some 400 pounds. Wallace Mathis, an employee of Kulzer, and the plaintiff in this case, was designated as foreman of the job. On the morning of April 9, 1957, he arrived at the plant of the steel company between 8 and 8:30 o'clock where he was met by a Kenneth Buffington, the defendant's maintenance coordinator, who made all the arrangements to have Mathis and his materials come in to the plant, and pointed out to him the places on the ridge of the roof where the ventilators were to be installed. There can be no doubt that while Wallace Mathis was on the defendant's property the morning of April 9, 1957, he was there as a business visitor and that the Lukens Steel Company owed him the duty of reasonable care to make its premises safe for him and to give him adequate warning of any dangers known to it and unknown to Mathis. ^[1]

The aforementioned ventilators were to be hoisted to the top of the Sodium Hydrate Building, the eaves of which were 39 feet above the ground. From the eaves the roof on both sides sloped inwardly to a peak or ridge, the slope measuring 6 inches to the foot. About a foot inside the eaves, on the north slope of the roof, rose a series of 14 poles or wire towers, each 12 feet 8 inches high, and each bearing two cross arms, the higher one holding in place three wires.

On the morning indicated, Mathis, by means of rungs attached to the poles for climbing purposes, ascended to the top of one of the poles for the purpose of suspending from one of the arms a block and tackle to be used in lifting materials for the ultimate installation, to perform which, he was on the defendant's premises. He held in his hands two ropes. He succeeded in tying one of them around the upper cross arm and was about to fasten the other rope close by, when there shot through his body 13,200 volts of electricity.

He brought suit in trespass against the Steel Company because of his resulting injuries and at the ensuing trial the jury returned a verdict in favor of the defendant. The plaintiff seeks a new trial, alleging certain trial errors. In his charge, the Trial Judge instructed the jury that if they found that Mathis was a trespasser at the time of the accident the defendant company owed him no duty of care save, of course, that of refraining from inflicting upon him any willful or wanton injury. ^[2] The plaintiff urges this instruction as error.

The Trial Judge in support of his instruction cites Porreca v. Atlantic Refining, 403 Pa. 171, 174, 168 A.2d 564, 566, where this Court said:

"One who is invited or permitted to enter a particular part of the land becomes a trespasser if he enters another part of the land . . .'. Restatement, Torts, section 341, comment (b). '* * * a license does not extend beyond the area to which the permission applies."

But at the time of the accident in this case, Mathis had not entered 'another part' of the defendant's land, or had he gone into an area beyond that to which he had been invited by the defendant. When Mathis was hit by the lightning bolts which shot from the wires, he was working in the explicit area in which he was to perform his duties. He was on land to which he had been brought by the defendant's own employee. He was engaged in the very task he had come to fulfill, under some supervision of the defendant company.

In Cooper v. Heintz Manufacturing Co., 385 Pa. 296, 122 A.2d 699, the plaintiff was struck also by 13,200 volts of electricity when his body came into the proximity of conveyors of electricity emerging from a transmission tower under the control of the defendant. It was urged there, as here that the plaintiff had no need to go to the roof of the transformer house and had he not done so, he would not have been injured. This Court said:

'The defendant argues that there was no need for the plaintiff to go to the roof. The plaintiff was a seasoned structural iron worker and has explained why he made the trip in question. In the face of this explanation, which was fortified by other circumstances and accepted by the jury as reasonable, one cannot arbitrarily conclude that Cooper ascended to the roof for the purpose of obtaining fresh air. * * * When a workman in the discharge of his duties proceeds from a place where it is necessary for him to be to another place where it is necessary for him to go, the law will not proclaim him guilty of contributory negligence if he moves over a route unknown to him, in the exercise of his normal faculties, to be dangerous.' (Emphasis supplied)

In the case at bar the plaintiff was a mechanic of many years experience. He testified that in 1952 he had worked on the roof of this very building. Two other Kulzer employees testified to having worked on the identical roof four or five years before, and one of them specified that he had hauled materials to the roof in approximately the same manner Mathis had attempted the operation. During one of these previous jobs the block and tackle attachment had remained on the crossbar for some four weeks, so that the defendant could not help but know of the practice. The evidence on this point on the plaintiff's side was not without contradiction, but the general picture which was created, negatived entirely any reasonable inference that the plaintiff, while engaged as a professional mechanic on this particular job, was a transgressor on the defendant's property, or was ever so regarded by anyone.

No evidence was presented which could justify a reasonable conclusion that Mathis conducted himself as a trespasser. So long as a worker does not intentionally stray from the locus in quo of his assigned task and continues to employ his faculties and strength in the reasonable completion of that task, he may not be characterized a trespasser. A worker who dutifully attends to his job with his eyes always on the accomplishment of his mission may not be branded a trespasser if, in the fulfillment of his responsibilities, he errs in judgment.

So long as the worker does not undertake an excursion of his own or skylarks away on some sudden self-generated whimsy, he cannot be regarded as an alien in the very realm of his occupational commitment. If, for instance, while Mathis was on the roof of the defendant's building, he had suddenly decided to engage in a kite-flying diversion or had set off on an exploration in the eaves for birds' nests, it could properly be argued that he had abandoned, at least temporarily, the purpose for which he was legally on the defendant's premises and the jury could determine from the facts if from a business visitor he had metamorphosed himself into a trespasser. But to say that a workman, without deviation from his main task, and while doing the very job for which he was invited to be on the defendant's premises, and without going beyond the physical limits of the area to which he has been invited, may become a trespasser is not only factually unrealistic in projection, but legally wrong. When the trial judge thus injected into his charge the proposition of trespass without any substance to support it, he rang a bell of misinstruction, whose discordant notes could not but have confused the jury as to the true issues in the lawsuit.

In argumentative reinforcement of its position on trespass the defendant summons as precedents the cases of Prokop v. Becker, 345 Pa. 607, 29 A.2d 23, Porreca v. Attlantic Refining Co., 403 Pa. 171, 168 A.2d 564 and Dumanski v. City of Erie, 348 Pa. 505, 34 A.2d 508. So far as authority for this case is concerned, these decisions melt away like the fog of irrelevancy before the sunshine of the facts which illuminate them in the State Reports. In Prokop v. Becker, the child-plaintiff was struck by the landing gear of an airplane while the child was at a place which the defendant-owner of the land had established as off-limits. Nor was there any evidence, as claimed by the plaintiffs, to establish the locus in quo as a playground.

In Porreca v. Atlantic Refining, the plaintiff was to pick up a shipment of motor oil at the defendant's place of business. When he arrived there, he did not go to any of the installations where the oil could be obtained. Instead, he circled a garage building and entered into it, without the defendant's consent, to obtain a wrench. While there he fell into a lubrication pit.

In Dumanski v. Erie, 348 Pa. 505, 34 A.2d 508, two boys had taken, in a small wagon, refuse to the city dump. After disposing of the waste they departed from the path which was used by trucks in going to and from the dump and entered into a cave of cinders where they had intended to gather bits of coal. Here the accident...