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Farmer v. B & G Food Enterprises6/6/2002
or the benefit of society in general, and for people involved in circumstances requiring their presence in particular. The court in Calvert v. Garvey Elevators, Inc., 694 P.2d 433 (1985) noted that " irefighters enter on the premises to discharge their duties. Fire fighters are present upon the premises, not because of any private duty owed the occupant, but because of the duty owed to the public as a whole." Calvert, supra, 694 P.2d 433.
The public hires, trains, and compensates firefighters and police officers to deal with dangerous, but inevitable situations. Usually, especially with fires, negligence causes the occasion for the safety officer's presence. Kreski, 415 N.W.2d at 186-87. See also Carson, 900 S.W.2d at 690.
. Rescue personnel are uniquely situated and thus call for a special rule. As noted by one commentator,
A firefighter may not decline to enter onto premises to fight a fire because a porch which he must cross appears rickety. A police officer may not decline to enter an office building to apprehend a suspected thief, simply because the approach to the office building may be slippery with snow and ice. On the contrary, police officers and firefighters simply act differently from ordinary citizens in encountering the obligations of their occupations and the manner in which they do so must be considered when assessing the applicability of the fireman's rule. Ordinary citizens do not, for instance, alight from their cars and attempt to traverse unknown premises, in the pitch dark of night, without some effort to illuminate their path. These are actions which no landowner should reasonably anticipate or foresee that a citizen will take. These are actions which the firefighter or police officer must take, at his sole judgment and discretion, without any notice or warning to the landowner of the unusual use which will be made of the property. Margaret Fonshell Ward, Clearing the Smoke Around the Fireman's Rule, 34 M.B.J. 48, 53 (June 2001).
. Minnesota and Oregon, two jurisdictions that have refused to recognize the firefighter's rule, would ignore premises liability standards and public policy and frame the issue on the basis of negligence and reasonable necessity. In Christensen v. Murphy, 678 P.2d 1210, 1218 (Or. 1984), the Oregon Supreme Court determined that " s a result of the statutory abolition of the implied assumption of risk, the '[policeman and] fireman's rule could no longer be used to prevent recovery by a public safety officer who suffered an injury as a result of the defendant's negligent conduct." Instead of relying on public policy arguments to retain the rule, the Christensen court determined the "so-called public policy reasons are merely redraped arguments drawn from premises liability or implied assumption of risk, neither of which are now available as legal foundations in [Oregon]." Id. at 1217.
C. Wisconsin Rule
. An interesting and persuasive deviation of the firefighter's rule is illustrated by the "Wisconsin rule," which holds that the firefighter's rule applies only if the initial act of negligence caused the injury to the policeman or fireman. This rule bars a cause of action only when the sole negligent act is the same negligent act that necessitated rescue and therefore brought the police officer/firefighter to the scene of the emergency. If the cause of action is based on any other negligent act (such as negligent failure to warn, negligent violation of an ordinance designed to protect the injured party, or negligent manufacture of a dangerous product), public policy does not bar recovery. The rule is based on public policy and is not rooted in premises liability. "Fundamentally, th[is rule] is
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