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Besser Co. v. Hansen2/28/1992
JUSTICE WHITING delivered the opinion of the Court.
This product liability case involves issues of a manufacturer's tort and implied warranty liability arising out of a third party's alleged misuse of the manufacturer's product.
On March 12, 1987, Raymond F. Hansen, an employee at a concrete block manufacturing plant of Tarmac-Lone Star Company (Tarmac) in Chesapeake, was injured in his operation of a "transfer car" manufactured by the Besser Company (Besser). Hansen sued Besser and recovered a judgment upon a jury's verdict for one million dollars. Besser appeals.
We state the evidence and the reasonable inferences that can be drawn therefrom in the light most favorable to Hansen, the party who prevailed at trial. Oden v. Salch, 237 Va. 525, 527, 379 S.E.2d 346, 348 (1989); Virginia & Md. R.R. v. White, 228 Va. 140, 142, 319 S.E.2d 755, 756 (1984).
Tarmac's Manufacturing Process
After Tarmac's cement blocks were formed, they were loaded on racks that held eight tons of the "green" blocks. The racks, equipped with flanged steel wheels, moved on railroad tracks.
Automatic coupling devices, supplied and maintained by Tarmac, were located in the center of the lower edges of the front and back of each rack. When the fronts and backs of the racks were pushed together, the racks were designed to couple automatically when a hook on the rear rack rolled over a bumper bar on the front rack and dropped down after clearing the bar.
Each loaded rack was hauled to one of four long, narrow rooms called "preset" rooms. When 10 loaded racks accumulated in the preset rooms, the coupled racks were pulled forward from the preset rooms along railroad tracks installed on the flat top of Besser's transfer car into one of the four "autoclaves" opposite each preset room.
The autoclave was a cylindrical, high-pressure, steel chamber 10 feet in diameter and 110 feet long with tracks in the bottom. The green blocks were then rapidly cured in the autoclaves under intense heat and pressure.
Besser's Transfer Car
Besser's electrically powered transfer car (the car) replaced a previous transfer car that had worn out. The front of Besser's car was considered as that part facing the autoclaves, and the rear was that part adjacent to the preset rooms. The sides of the car were considered right or left as they would appear to an operator standing at the rear of the car facing forward.
The car pulled the racks along its surface by means of a "shuttle" or ram installed between its railroad tracks. This shuttle was a steel platform connected to a large, screw-type, electrically driven shaft or extended worm gear.
The rotation of this worm gear clockwise or counterclockwise caused the shuttle to go forward or backward between the front and back ends of the car. At each end of the shuttle was a "ratchet-like" device called a "dog" that, when raised by a cam, successively engaged a series of hooks in the center of the bottom of each rack. When a dog and a rack hook were engaged, the rack was pulled forward or backward in the desired direction across the car's surface as the electrically driven worm gear rotated.
The pulling tension kept the dog and hook engaged until the shuttle reached the limit of its movement. At that point, the worm gear stopped rotating, released the pulling tension, and the dog dropped from the hook in the bottom of the rack. Because there were no dogs engaged in one of the
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