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Beta Steel v. Rust6/30/2005
FOR PUBLICATION
Case Summary
Beta Steel ("Beta") appeals the trial court's denial of its motion for summary judgment in Margaret Rust's negligence action against it for the wrongful death of her husband, Brian Rust. We affirm.
Issues
We restate and reorder the issues before us as:
I. whether there is any evidence Beta owed a duty of due care to Brian, an employee of an independent contractor hired by Beta to perform work at Beta's facility;
II. whether, if such a duty was owed, there is any evidence Beta breached that duty; and
III. whether, if Beta owed a duty to Brian and breached that duty, the alleged negligence of the independent contractor was the intervening cause of Brian's death as a matter of law.
Facts
Beta contracted with Hyre Electric to complete a project at its steel mill that involved the relocation, in the mill's electrical control room, of certain equipment onto an elevated steel rack. On January 28, 2000, Brian was working above an electrical control cabinet, the top of which is about six feet above the floor, installing and welding part of the steel rack. At some point, he stepped down onto the metal top of the cabinet, which then buckled and came into contact with energized components inside the cabinet. This resulted in Brian's electrocution and death, as well as several explosions in the control room that lasted for three to five minutes before power could be shut off. It is unclear from the designated evidence whether Brian stepped on the cabinet intentionally or inadvertently.
The electrical control cabinet Brian stepped on had been installed at Beta's mill in 1991. There is designated evidence in the record that Phillip Doolittle, an electrical engineer/consultant, advised Beta at the time that its electrical control cabinets lacked ground fault protection, as required by electrical safety regulations, to cut the flow of electricity within a fraction of a second in the event of a problem. Without installing such a system, Doolittle told Beta representatives, they were risking human life and damage to hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. Doolittle also testified in his deposition that a Beta employee responded to his recommendation to install a ground fault protection system, "We'll do that later." App. p. 166. However, when Doolittle inspected Beta's electrical control room after Brian's death, he found to his "shock, disbelief, and extreme disappointment" that it had not installed the recommended system. Id. at 184. Doolittle also opined that such a system could have prevented Brian's death, and the most that might have happened would have been Brian's being startled by a loud clap and falling to the ground after he stepped on top of the cabinet. Doolittle also stated that all other steel mills in Northwest Indiana "without exception" have ground fault protection systems such as he recommended to Beta Id. at 183.
There is also designated evidence in the record that electricians routinely walk on top of metal electrical control cabinets without difficulty in performing their work. Edward McCorkle of Hyre, Brian's foreman, testified in a deposition that in his thirty years as an electrician, every metal electrical control cabinet he was aware of had been strong enough to walk on top of. He also testified, "We work on metal clad switch gear all the time that is energized, and if there was a problem we should have been told." Id. at 742.
Brian Green, Beta's Electrical Maintenance Supervisor, was aware that electricians sometimes walked on top of electrical control cabinets to perform their work, and he had done
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