Reynolds v. Barnard
| Decision Date | 01 April 1897 |
| Citation | 168 Mass. 226,46 N.E. 703 |
| Parties | REYNOLDS v. BARNARD. |
| Court | United States State Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts Supreme Court |
J.B. Ratigan, for plaintiff.
Geo. S Taft, for defendant.
1. The ruling that the plaintiff could not recover under the first count was right. The staging by the breaking of which he was hurt was not a part of the defendant's ways, works, or machinery, within the meaning of St.1887, c 270, § 1, cl. 1. The plaintiff was a slater, whose work required him to walk upon the topmost of several stagings fastened to a roof, six or seven feet below the ridge pole. The staging consisted of planks laid upon triangular brackets, each made of three pieces of wood nailed together, and fastened to the roof by a strip of zinc, one end of which was nailed to the roof, and the other end to the bracket. The brackets were made as needed, from pieces of refuse lumber, picked up at the building by any of the workmen who saw fit to do that part of the work; and those in use when the plaintiff was hurt had been put upon the section of the roof where he was working by other workmen after the plaintiff himself had taken them down from another section. The staging was heavily loaded with slates, and fell by reason of the collapse of an upright forming part of one of the brackets. As held in Burns v. Washburn, 160 Mass. 457, 36 N.E. 199, and in Adasken v. Gilbert, 165 Mass. 443, 43 N.E. 199, a temporary staging of this kind, built and put up by the workmen themselves, for use upon a particular job, "is not within the term 'ways, works, or machinery' in the statute." The staging as to which, in Prendible v. Manufacturing Co., 160 Mass. 131, 35 N.E. 675, it was held that the jury could find it to be part of the ways, works, or machinery, was one of several permanently kept for use about the yard of a mill, and taken down and put up from time to time, and intended to be used from four days to a week at a time in each place where it was erected. The staging in the present case was of the class of appliances which, in Burns v. Washburn and in Adasken v. Gilbert, were not held within the statute.
2. While it cannot be said, as matter of law, either that the plaintiff was careless in going upon the staging, or that the danger that it would collapse was so obvious that he must be held to have taken the risk, in the opinion of a majority of the court it cannot be said, as matter of law, that the careful oversight of the work by a superintendent would not have prevented the...
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