240 Pa. 354 | Pa. | 1913
Opinion by
This case requires but brief consideration. It arises out of the same facts as Reeder v. Lehigh Valley Coal Company, 231 Pa. 563, and Pauza v. Lehigh Valley Coal Company, 231 Pa. 577. The plaintiff in the present case was one of a number of employees of the defendant company who entered its mine on the morning of December 16, 1905, and was injured by the explosion of a keg of powder, carried by one James Smith, another employee, which came in contact with the electric haulage wire. The questions in the case on which the liability of the defendant turned were: (a) Did the defendant company provide a passageway for use of its employees through the tunnel as required, by the statute,
In submitting the case to the jury, the learned judge said: “We may say there are two principal points involved. The one is as to whether the defendant carried out the law as laid down in this act of assembly. The other point is as to whether the plaintiff himself contributed toward this accident or whether any other co-employee at this colliery contributed toward this accident.” He further instructed the jury that the failure to provide the passageway “must have been the proximate cause of the accident.” We distinctly ruled in the Reeder case that the defendant company did not provide a safe passageway on the east side of the tunnel, and that whether Smith was negligent or not could not be declared by the court as a matter of law but was a question for the jury. By its own admission as to the facts of the case the defendant did not provide the requisite passageway or safety holes on the west side of the tunnel. These were the controlling questions in the present ease, and having been determined in favor of the plaintiff, a verdict for him necessarily followed.
The statement of claim avers that the defendant dis
We have carefully examined the several assignments of error, and in view of the questions involved and submitted to the jury we find no merit in any of the assignments. The learned counsel for the defendant company apparently misapprehended the issues in the case as well as the theory on which the case was tried.
The elaborate opinions of Mr. Justice Elkin in the