General Refining Co. v. International Harvester Co.

Offutt, J., delivered the opinion of the Court. On July 22nd, 1986, a truck loaded with 3,500 gallons of kerosene and weighing about twenty tons, which was owned by the General Refining Company, and driven by Henry R. Steinert, its employee, while proceeding north on the Bel Air Road, “became disabled” at a point about three miles south of Bel Air, and stopped. Steinert thereupon called his employer, and in response to that call Fred P. Esbrandt, its plant manager in Baltimore, called the International Harvester Company and instructed it to send a man to repair the tractor on the ⁴⁰⁶ road. It agreed to send a man to make the repairs and, pursuant to that undertaking, one Horwath, an employee of the International Harvester Company, from which the General Refining Company had purchased the truck, was sent to it with a towing truck.

When he arrived he found, in addition to the disabled truck, a smaller truck which' had been sent by the refining company to unload the kerosene. Horwath announced that he had been ordered to “pull the truck,” and, without waiting for it to be unloaded, attached the disabled truck to his towing truck with a twelve-foot chain and attempted to tow it into Bel Air with Steinert at the wheel of the disabled truck to guide it and operate the brakes. In descending a grade the disabled truck began to overrun the tow truck, which suddenly increased its speed to avoid a collision. As the tow truck increased its speed, it swung the refining company truck “to the left and then to the right”, so„that it overturned and was wrecked.

Thereafter, the refining company brought this action in the Court of Common Pleas of Baltimore City against the International Harvester Company to recover for the damage to its truck, on the theory that it was caused by the defendant’s negligence. At the close of the plaintiff’s case the court directed a verdict for the defendant on the ground that it appeared from the uncontradicted evidence that negligence on the part of the agents and servants of the plaintiff directly contributed to the happening of the accident. The appeal is from the judgment on that verdict. The evidence in the 'case tended to prove facts which appear in the following narrative: When Horwath first arrived on the scene he said that “he got orders to pull the truck.” Steinert then said, “Well we got orders to unload it first, from the Bel Air plant.” Steinert then moved the disabled truck a few feet so that Horwath could “hear the transmission,” “and he decided he had to pull the truck.” The disabled truck included two units, a tractor and a trailer, so that, when the towing truck was attached to the tractor, there were three units fast ⁴⁰⁷ ened together; the towing truck, the tractor, and the trailer.

Before Horwath attached the tow truck to the tractor, Steinert said to him: “ ‘Brother, this is a vacuum system tractor, I won’t be in gear because I can’t use my transmisson, but I will keep the motor running, that will .give me the brakes; but please pay attention to me back there in case I burn my brakes off coming down the hills,’ that I would attract his attention by my air horn, which I blasted I don’t know how long, and no one didn’t seem to pay any attention to me, what was going on up front in that cab I couldn’t tell you; I couldn’t see through the back of the cab, so I done to the best of my knowledge, I picked out by place, what I was going to do; no matter where I went I would have to go over the chain.” Horwath, however, decided to take the risk and tow the disabled truck to Bel Air without unloading it, and fastened the tractor to the towing truck with two “pieces of broken chain.” In the course of the cross-examination of Steinert as to his assent to Horwath’s plan of towing the disabled truck to Bel Air before unloading it, he gave this testimony: “The truck couldn’t be towed unless you ran in. gear, unless you used that tow bar, and that he didn’t have, because that weight was too big to be on back of a chain. Q. Well, did you think of that before you started to be towed? A. Yes, sir. He said he had none, and he decided he was going to tow that truck, and he sent our little truck away.

Q. Well, of course, he couldn’t really have towed your truck unless you wanted him to do it, could he? A. I didn’t want him to do it. Q. You mean to tell 'this Court and jury that you really didn’t want that man to tow the truck? A. Absolutely.

I had my orders. Q. Well, then, why did you let him tow it? A. Because he intended to tow the truck, he hooked up to it and sent the other driver away. Q. And you just fell in line and let him do what he wanted to do, is that right? .A. It wasn’t up to me.

He told me he had his orders, and that was that. Q. From the very beginning did you think this was going to be a very dangerous job? ⁴⁰⁸ A. I did. Q. You really did? A. That’s the reason I explained everything to the man, before I— Q. Hid you feel there was going to be an accident?

A. Well, I didn’t feel there was going to be an accident but I felt like it was a tedious job to move a truck that size with a load on it. Q. Well, if that’s the way you felt about it, why didn’t you really then use a little more insistence, and say to this man ‘I am not going to allow you to tow this truck’, I think it is unsafe’ ? A. Well, this man, he used his insistence on me, saying that he knew what he was doing. He was the best man the company had, .so they said.

Q. But, after all, you were the one asking for assistance, weren’t you? You called in for the assistance? A. I called in for assistance, but that wasn’t what they sent him there for. He was supposed to unload the truck before he towed it.

Q. Did you stop him from unloading it? A. I didn’t stop him from unloading it. The driver of the International told the other man he could have me in Bel Air in five minutes. We were only about five miles outside of Bel Air.” When they started to Bel Air the brakes on the disabled truck were in perfect condition, but the truck could not be driven in gear because the transmission was “torn to pieces.” After they “got under way,” Steinert had “to hold plenty to hold that thing back from creeping up on,this man,” and, when finally his truck did begin to creep up, he tried to attract Horwath’s attention by repeatedly sounding his horn.

For a time Horwath paid no attention to him and the. front wheel of the disabled truck crossed the’slack of the twelve-foot tow chain, When Horwath’s attention was finally attracted to the situation, “the tractor and trailer was alongside and to the left of the tow truck with the front of the tractor about four or five feet past the rear of the truck.” Horwath then, Steinert said, “started off with an enormous amount of speed to get away from me, and that’s what upset me; he whipped that chain up around the top of the wheel and it swung me hard to the right, and whipped me back, which turned the front of the truck over and ⁴⁰⁹ that trailer stood up on its nose and flopped over and the loadi ran out on top of me, and our other driver ran back and held my head up out of it to keep it from running across my face; and this other man was running up and down the road there, he didn’t know what to do.” Aubrey S. Harkins, manager of appellant’s Bel Air plant, ordered two trucks to unload the kerosene from the disabled' truck, and never countermanded that order, and, when he arrived at the point where the truck was disabled, he so informed Horwath, but Horwath said, “ ‘Never mind, it isn’t going to be hard to pull.’ I said, ‘Well, I have got the trucks here for this unloading.’ He said: ‘It’s no.use; save all the work we can. I will tow it to Bel Air. It won’t be much to tow, and no trouble.’ And I also made the remark to him I didn’t think much of the idea of towing it with a chain.” Fred P. Esbrandt, appellant’s Baltimore plant manager, said: “He received a call from Steinert that his tractor was disabled near Bel Air; at that time they did not have mechanics at the plant for the purpose of making repairs to the tractors. He called the International Harvester Company and instructed them to send a man to repair tne tractor on the road; the tractor was an International Tractor and he was informed by some one of the International Harvester Company that they would send a repaSr man to take care of it, and that the mechanic was to do all he could to repair the job on the road, if not, he was to take him back to Baltimore if he could not repair it on the road.” An examination of the brakes of the appellant’s trailer truck after the accident disclosed that they were in very bad condition.

At the close of the plaintiff’s case, the defendant offered two prayers; one a general demurrer to the evidence; two, a peremptory instruction that the uncontradicted evidence showed that the negligence of the plaintiff, its servants and agent, contributed to the happening of the accident, and that the verdict of the jury must for that reason be for the defendant. The first prayer was refused and the second granted. ⁴¹⁰ The questions submitted by the appeal are two: One, whether there was legally sufficient evidence of primary nqgligence, for, if there was not, then the judgment should not be reversed even though there was error in granting the contributory negligence prayer, and, two, was the defendant guilty of contributory negligence as a matter of law. The trial court decided that there was legally sufficient evidence of primary negligence, and in that conclusion we fully concur. Conceding the truth of the plaintiff’s evidence, which the demurrer does, it may be found that the defendant’s agent, notwithstanding plain and repeated warnings of the danger of the plan, undertook to tow by a twelve-foot chain a twenty-ton truck which could neither be driven nor towed in gear, over a hilly road, and that, in the course of that operation, not only did he fail to keep a constant watch to note the progress and situation of the disabled truck, but he was so oblivious of the dangers of the situation and so inattentive that he failed to hear the sound of the horn which the driver of the disabled truck sounded to warn him that that truck was in danger.

Steinert, when asked how often he sounded his horn, said: “I just couldn’t say just how many times but it was an enormous amount, because I began to get jittery in there at what was facing me; and I could have left the truck and let him have them both, but I tried my best to stop that truck because it had inflammable merchandise on board.” Moreover, when Horwath finally saw the danger, he increased the speed of his own truck so suddenly, and so' much, that it whipped the tow chain over the front wheel of the disabled truck, swung it to the right, and then “whipped” it back, so that it was inevitably overturned. There can be no reasonable doubt that such conduct manifested a heedless indifference to a patent and obvious danger which can only be characterized as reckless, and it needs no citation of authority to support the conclusion that it afforded legally sufficient evidence of primary negligence. ⁴¹¹ The substantial question in the case is whether the facts stated above establish the plaintiff’s contributory negligence as a matter of