Torrans v. Texarkana Gas & Electric Co.

• Decision Date: 16 November 1908
• Citation: 115 S.W. 389,88 Ark. 510
• Parties: TORRANS v. TEXARKANA GAS & ELECTRIC COMPANY
• Court: Arkansas Supreme Court

115 S.W. 389

88 Ark. 510

TORRANS v. TEXARKANA GAS & ELECTRIC COMPANY

Supreme Court of Arkansas

November 16, 1908

Appeal from Miller Circuit Court; Jacob M. Carter, Judge; affirmed.

STATEMENT BY THE COURT.

Appellant was a milliner in the city of Texarkana, Arkansas. The store she occupied was eighty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and sixteen feet from floor to ceiling. Appellee was a corporation engaged in the manufacture, distribution and sale of gas in Texarkana. Appellant employed appellee to install two arc lamps in her store. These depended from the ceiling. One was placed in the rear end, about twelve feet from the rear end wall, and midway between the side walls east and west. The other was placed in the front end. The lamps were supplied with gas by a pipe which entered from the front and ran along the side of the front end wall to the ceiling, then along the center of the ceiling over the lamps. The lamps hung about six feet below the ceiling, and were connected with the gas pipe above by a pipe which made an elbow at the ceiling. Each lamp had three burners, which were supplied with gas by feeders. A pilot light which was designed to burn continuously was connected with each lamp. The pilot light burned with a flame about a half inch high. The lamps were lighted by pulling a chain which opened a valve to the gas pipe and were extinguished by also pulling a chain which closed the valve. A meter was connected with the gas pipe which measured the flow of gas, showing the amount consumed. On the fourteenth of September, 1907, the day the lamps were put up, parties in the store could not light the lamps, and the agent of the gas company came and lighted them with a taper. Again Monday night following (the 16th) the parties in the store could not light the lamps, and again the agent of the gas company came and lighted them with a taper. He said "Your lights are all right." The lamps were not lighted any more until the succeeding Saturday night (21st). That night the lamps were lighted without any trouble The trouble about lighting the lamps was on the previous nights. The lights burned Saturday night from about seven till nine o'clock, and had burned about the same time the previous nights when they were lighted. Sunday morning about 9:30 o'clock, September 22d, a fire occurred in appellant's store. Parties in proximity to the building at the time first discovered the fire by the smoke that came from the building. There was no noise of any explosion. Those first in the building, members of the fire department discovered a little fire in the back part of the store, and near the west wall. A considerable hole in the ceiling had burned out there, and there were evidences of where the fire had burned up the west wall through the shelving. The policeman and the chief of the fire department and some of the firemen who were the first in the building testified that they first discovered the fire in the ceiling next to the west wall; one witness saying that he was one of the first to get there, that it seemed that the fire caught back on the floor and got up in the ceiling. Goods or merchandise was burning eight or ten feet from the wall in the southwest corner. The chief of the fire department said they pulled down the ceiling "where the fire was, and cut another hole for the purpose of getting their heads up through there to see where the fire was spreading." "There was of course, no fire where we cut the other hole. The second hole was cut right above this arc light." The firemen substantially corroborate the testimony of the chief as to the place where the fire was first discovered and the condition that obtained when they first reached the building and as to what was done by them after they arrived there. One of them stated: "There was no fire at the place where we pulled the ceiling down in the centre. The ceiling, though had been burned between that joint and the west wall."

Appellant testified that when she reached her store after the alarm of fire "she found it crowded with people, and as it seemed to her a foot deep in water, she found the firemen were playing water all up in the ceiling around the rear lamp. The fire was out. It was all black, smoking, charred and burning, and the ceiling all around the lamp in the back end of my store was burned. The lamp was pulled down from the ceiling. The ceiling was charred, and the lamp was pulled down on the floor, and the pipe lay against the work table. When asked what was the condition of the ceiling above the lamp, she replied, "It had dropped down on the table and floor and was simply a charred mass." She was asked: "Assuming that the fire started at the rear lamp, what direction did it take?" and answered: "It went towards the west wall. The fire burned to the wall between me and Nasons' (west wall). It burned from the lamp to the wall, that I know." She further testified that her work table was right under the lamp, that it was full of goods, and that these were destroyed, and that the goods were destroyed along the way to the west wall. Witnesses on behalf of appellant who examined the store after the fire, some of them on the day of the fire and others a day or two afterwards, testified substantially that the ceiling was burned from where the rear lamp was suspended clear over the west wall. One of the witnesses testified: "I did not see the fire. I do not know that the flame traveled toward the west wall, but I judge that it did. I found the ceiling pretty badly burned near the place where the split fitting had been on the ceiling, then westward towards the wall of the building, and my recollection is that it burned more in that direction than it did right where the fitting was." Appellant testified that on Saturday night before she was burned out on Sunday morning, when she was in the act of closing the store for the night, she went back and tried the rear lamp, which had attracted her attention during the week by flaring up so high that she thought the lamp was lit. She had reference to the pilot light that was kept burning during the whole week. The pilot light burned up brighter when she noticed it. Witness detected the odor of escaping gas in the work room on Saturday afternoon before the fire. After the fire, the pipe that connected the rear lamp with the gas pipe on the ceiling was tested by plumbers, and they discovered a leak in the pipe at the elbow where it was joined on to the other pipe at the ceiling. It was a slit in one of the fittings, and when the gas was turned on and a match applied it burned a blaze about a quarter of an inch high, or, as one of the witnesses said: "The flame was about half that of an ordinary match." The employee of the appellee who put up the lamps testified: "I turned on the gas, burned off the mandrel and tested the pipe to see if there was any leak anywhere. I held a match all around the joints that I made in the line, and if there had been any leak anywhere it would have caught on fire. I did not find any leak, I put the L on that pipe in Mrs. Torrans' store. There was no crack or split in it then. I painted this pipe and did not see any split. If there was anything broken about it, I did not find it." The partition between the work room and store room lacked about five feet of reaching the ceiling. There were several broken panes of glass in the back window to the work room. There was an open flue on the west wall about opposite the arc lamp.

The testimony of experts who were familiar with the properties of water gas, the kind used in this building, was substantially as follows: That when water gas is emitted into air it will mix in a proportion which is less than nine per cent. volume, and when it comes in contact with a match or spark there is no action, but when the percentage of water gas mixed with air is more than 9 per cent. and less than 50 per cent. then it will explode very violently. When the percentage of water gas is more than 55 per cent. and it is ignited, it will simply burn throughout the room. When it is less than 9 per cent. there will be no action at all. That is due to the fact that there is a great excess of air. When gas explodes, it always explodes very violently, and there is always a report from it as the gas expands. A gas explosion in a store room would cause the doors and windows to be blown out. A store room eighty feet long, twenty-five feet wide with ceiling sixteen feet high would contain 32,000 cubic feet, and before it would explode 9 per cent. of that would have to be gas or 2800 cubic feet. When you emit water gas into a room, it will go to the top of the ceiling; and if there are no openings in the ceiling, it will gradually diffuse in the room. It will spread itself through the entire room. It would not confine itself to any particular part of the room. It would first rise to the ceiling, and then if it could not get out it would begin to diffuse and mix with the air generally. If there is a window that is broken out, or there is a flue or holes in the door through which it can escape, it will go out in its natural course through those openings. It would diffuse out in the open air, just as well as in the room. Where there is a leak in a gas pipe a half inch or an inch long, which would light a flame a quarter of an inch high, there could be no danger from the quantity of gas that would escape. There would be no danger from the escaping gas from a pilot light, should it go out, as there would never be enough gas in a room the size of this store to equal 9 per cent. of the volume. You can readily smell gas where there is less than one per cent. in a room.

If any large quantity gets in a room, it will make one very sick. These arc burners would burn forty cubic feet of gas per hour or four...