Associated Indemnity Corp. v. Industrial Accident Commission

VAN DYKE, P. J.

The widow of Hobart Johnson filed her application for adjustment of claim with respondent commission. She alleged that on December 9, 1951, while

[424]

employed as a laborer by the Trask Company, Johnson had suffered “heart failure from over exertion” while digging a pit, “resulting in Coronary Occlusion causing death.” The respondent commission awarded her compensation and this proceeding was brought to review that action.

The following appears: Decedent had been in apparent good health prior to the date of his death. He had not been attended by a doctor for illness of any kind during the preceding five years. He was employed five days per week as a janitor for another employer and on Saturdays and Sundays he worked for the Trask Company. Decedent did not complain of aches or pains while working on the day he died. Decedent, with his employer, left San Francisco in the morning and proceeded to Modesto where they did further digging in a pit 9 feet long by 5 feet wide which had been partially dug. They alternated working in the pit at about 15-minute intervals. They were digging the pit with hand shovels, one shoveling the dirt from the pit bottom to the surface, the other shoveling it from there into a small truck. When the truck was filled they drove about 5 miles to a dump where they shoveled the dirt out of the truck. The elapsed time from pit to dump was about 25 minutes. They had made three trips and had returned when decedent got into the pit, picked up his shovel, commented there was only about a foot and a half more to be dug, collapsed and died. The death certificate gave the cause of death as “Coronary occlusion, arteriosclerosis of coronary arteries with atheromatous degeneration of blood vessel walls.”

Doctor Ransom' Coroner of Stanislaus County, said that the autopsy “showed the customary hardening of the arteries over the entire system” extending “to the blood vessels supplying heart muscle. ’ ’ He said he found a coronary occlusion ; and a diseased area where the occlusion took place; that there was “atheromatous degeneration and thickening and shrinking of the lining of the artery”; and that the coronary artery at the place of the occlusion was considerably smaller than normal. He found that the final occlusion was caused by little crusts from the atheromatous lining of the diseased artery. He testified that the development of arteriosclerosis took a long period of time; that he had known of people so afflicted falling dead while walking on the street, or who were working, driving or who became scared; that he considered shoveling hard work.