Pennsylvania Co. v. Whitlock

• Decision Date: 25 November 1884
• Docket Number: 8576
• Citation: 99 Ind. 16
• Parties: The Pennsylvania Company v. Whitlock
• Court: Indiana Supreme Court

99 Ind. 16

The Pennsylvania Company v. Whitlock

No. 8576

Supreme Court of Indiana

November 25, 1884

From the Porter Circuit Court.

The judgment is reversed, with costs, and the cause remanded for further proceedings.

J Brackenridge and J. R. Carey, for appellant.

T. J Merrifield and J. D. McLaren, for appellee.

Niblack J. Zollars, C. J., having been at one time of counsel in this cause, expresses no opinion, and does not take part in the decision.

OPINION

Niblack J.

Complaint by Robert Whitlock against the Pennsylvania Company in two paragraphs.

The first paragraph charged that the defendant was a railroad corporation, and as such was, and had been for the five years then immediately preceding, operating, managing and controlling the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway, running through the county of Laporte, together with all the depots, station-houses and other property appertaining to said railway; that for a long time prior to the 9th day of January, 1875, the defendant kept, maintained and controlled a station-house on the line of said railway at the town of Wanatah, in said county of Laporte, for the accommodation of passengers and for convenience in the transportation of freight, using, also, a part of the same for the ticket and telegraph offices; that said station-house was, during all the time named, under the immediate charge of an agent and servant of the defendant, who caused the same to be heated with a large wood-burning stove, the pipe of which ran into a flue in the building which had been so carelessly, negligently and unskilfully constructed as not to prevent the escape of sparks and flames through the sides thereof, and which was, and had been, maintained in such an unsafe and dilapidated condition as to greatly endanger such station-house and property adjacent thereto, of all which the defendant had notice; that the defendant, so having notice of the unsafe and dangerous condition of said flue, refused to repair the same; that the plaintiff was, at the time herein above stated, the owner, and in the actual occupancy, of a large two-story frame hotel building, in said town of Wanatah, of the value of $ 6,000, and of furniture and other personal property used in said hotel building of the value of $ 2,000; that said hotel building was next and adjacent to the southwest corner of said station-house, with only a small, as well as a clear and unobstructed space between the two buildings; that, on said 9th day of January, 1875, said station-house caught fire from and through the cracked, unsafe and dilapidated flue so constructed therein, as above set forth, and was thereby totally consumed; that while said station-house was burning, fire was communicated therefrom by the wind to the hotel building, whereby said latter building, with the furniture and other personal property therein contained, was also burned up, and wholly destroyed, without any fault or negligence on the part of the plaintiff.

The second paragraph contained substantially the same facts as the first, except that it charged that the defendant's servants and employees were in the habit of pouring oil on the kindlings and wood put in the stove as fuel, thus making quickly hot and blazing fires, which habit was fully known to the defendant, and that, on the morning of the said 9th day of January, 1875, the defendant, by its servants and employees, negligently and carelessly made a quick, hot and blazing fire in the stove in the station-house by pouring oil over the kindlings and wood put therein, from which fire sparks and flames escaped through the cracks in the flue into which the stove-pipe entered, thus setting the station-house on fire and burning it up, and that while the station-house was so burning up, fire was blown by the wind from the same to, on and against the plaintiff's hotel building, setting fire to it, also, in that way, and consuming it, and the furniture and other personal property used therein.

Demurrers were severally overruled to both paragraphs of the complaint, and, issue being joined, the plaintiff obtained a verdict and judgment against the defendant for $ 3,000.

In the natural order of objections made to the proceedings below, the question of the sufficiency of the complaint is first presented. It is claimed that the facts averred in both paragraphs of the complaint disclosed only a case of the accidental burning of the station-house, and of the accidental spread of fire to the hotel building, from which it must be inferred that the negligence charged was not the proximate cause of the injury complained of.

It is not easy at all times to determine what are really proximate and what are only remote damages. That we must so use our own as not to injure another, is an ancient and axiomatic rule of the law, but it is often found to be very difficult and perplexing to make a just and reasonable application of this most excellent general rule. There must be some limit to the extent of liability for injuries even in cases of the grossest and most inexcusable negligence. In close cases, however, it is frequently very hard to determine just where the line between liability and non-liability for seeming negligence ought to be drawn.

The damages for which a party is, and upon principle ought to be liable, are those which are the natural or necessary consequences of his wrongful act. But where some other agency intervenes and extends the injurious effects of the wrongful act beyond the range of its natural or necessary consequences, and beyond what could ordinarily have been anticipated, the party originally at fault is not responsible for such additional injurious effects.

As incidental to the improvements of the age in which we live, and to the vast amount of combustible material in daily use by the people of this country, injuries by fire have been the subject of much judicial investigation within the past few years, and have become a subject about which much has been recently said and written. As applicable, however, to the particular question now before us, the authorities are not numerous, and some of the cases which have been brought to our attention are not in harmony with each other. This want of harmony is, however, mainly between the older cases on the one side, and the more modern cases on the other, the tendency all the while having been towards either a non-liability, or a more restricted liability, for merely accidental fires.

By the common law of England, before the enactment of any statute on the subject, a person in whose house a fire originated, which afterwards spread to his neighbor's property and destroyed it, was compelled to make good his neighbor's loss by the fire. But by a statute of 6 Anne c. 31, amended and substantially re-enacted by another statute of 14 Geo III. c. 78, sec. 86, it was provided "That no action, suit, on process whatever, shall be had, maintained or prosecuted, against any person in whose house, chamber, stable, barn, or other building, or on whose estate any fire shall, after the said twenty-fourth day of June, [1774] accidentally begin, nor shall any recompense be made by such person for any damage suffered thereby; any law, usage, or custom, to the contrary notwithstanding."

Blackstone, in his commentaries, after referring to the ancient common law doctrine on the subject of accidental fires, says: "But now the common law is, in the former case, altered by statute 6 Ann., c. 3 [31], which ordains that no action shall be maintained against any, in whose house or chamber any fire shall accidentally begin; for their own loss is sufficient punishment for their own or their servant's carelessness." 1 Cooley's Blackst. Com. 431.

In the case of Lansing v. Stone, 37 Barb. 15, it was held that the common law of England on the subject of accidental fires, as modified by the statutes of 6 Anne and 14 Geo. III., supra, had become the common law of the State of New York, and, quoting Blackstone as above approvingly, further held that where a man's house or other building takes fire, even by his own or his servants' negligence, and the fire spreads to and consumes his neighbor's property, he can not be made liable for the latter's loss, upon the theory that the interest which a man has in preserving his own property ought to be considered a sufficient guaranty, as it is in fact the only one his neighbors have against his and his servants' negligence.

The case of Ryan v. New York C. R. R. Co., 35 N.Y. 210, was a more recent New York case. The facts upon which that case rested were briefly, that the railroad company, either by the carelessness of its servants, or through the bad condition of one of its locomotives, set fire to one of its own wood-sheds in the city of Syracuse, which sheltered and contained a large quantity of wood. The plaintiff's house, standing at a distance of about one hundred and thirty feet from the shed, took fire from the sparks and heat thrown out by the burning shed and wood, and was thus entirely consumed. A considerable number of other houses and buildings were burned and destroyed by the spreading of the same fire. Upon proof of these facts the circuit court nonsuited the plaintiff, and the judgment was affirmed at the general term of the supreme court of the proper district. The cause was then taken to the Court of Appeals, where the judgment was again affirmed by the unanimous, as well as exhaustive, opinion of that court. The statutes of 6 Anne and 14 Geo. III., supra, were not referred to or relied upon in that opinion, but the conclusion reached was based upon the inference that the railroad company's negligence was only the remote, and hence not the proximate, cause of the plaintiff's loss.

Hunt J.,...