Home Fire Insurance v. Southwestern Engineering Corp.

HOUSER, J.

This appeal is from a judgment recovered by the plaintiff against the defendant in an action wherein the plaintiff, an insurance company, was subrogated to the rights of its assured. Primarily, the validity of the judgment depends upon the correctness of the conclusion reached by the trial court in substance that while the assured was engaged in procuring from the defendant at its place of business a truck-load of casing-head gasoline, the truck, belonging to the assured and on which the gasoline was intended to be transported, was consumed by fire which was caused by and through the negligence of the defendant.

Prom the evidence the trial judge was justified in concluding that casing-head gasoline is a volatile substance of a very dangerous, explosive, character; that in loading the truck the methods employed by the defendant were negligent in that they were “makeshift” and permitted the escape from such gasoline of large quantities of gas which, owing greatly to the stillness of the air and the foggy conditions then and there present, first settled about the truck, which, to the knowledge of the defendant, was being loaded in a large oil-producing area and in an atmosphere already “saturated” with like explosive gases, and that such escaped gas traveled in a sort of lane or path toward a boiler which

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at that time and in such circumstances was being negligently operated by the defendant at a distance of about 110 feet from the truck; that the necessary and inevitable result of the operation of said boiler at said time and under the conditions then and there present was that the air which was supplied to, or permitted the existence of, the fire underneath the boiler, drew in with it a sufficient quantity of the" gas which had escaped from the operation of loading the truck, so that when such gas came in contact with the fire an explosion or so-called “flareback” occurred, which ignited the gas in the near vicinity of the boiler, which burning gas traveled to the truck and resulted in its destruction as appropriately set forth in the complaint in the action.

The principal point relied upon by the appellant is that the evidence adduced on the trial of the action was insufficient to sustain the findings and the judgment. Although the usual contradictions appear in the evidence produced by the respective parties to the litigation, it is clear that as a whole the evidence sufficiently supports the foregoing foundational facts, as well as the findings made by the trial court. In such circumstances, the point presented by appellant cannot be sustained.