Long v. Greenough Red Ash Coal Co.

Citations

• 59 Pa. Super. 235
• 1915 Pa. Super. LEXIS 56

Syllabus

<p>Negligence — Mines and mining — Master and servant — Duty of employer to instruct.</p> <p>1. It is the duty of an owner of a coal mine to instruct an inexperienced employee, who is assigned to new duties in an unfamiliar part of the mine, and to warn him of the dangers incident to his employment and how to avoid them; if the danger cannot be reasonably anticipated or foreseen, the employee cannot be guilty of contributory negligence when injured, by reason of such unforeseen danger incident to his employment.</p> <p>2. Although a servant be fully conscious of the danger incident to the discharge of a duty in a particular way as if he had been expressly warned of the danger, it does not necessarily follow that his employer is relieved of the duty to instruct him further. There may be two modes in which the duty can be discharged, one safe and the other dangerous, and if the servant be young and inexperienced, and be not instructed, it cannot be declared as a matter of law that the risk of making a wrong choice is one of the incidental risks which he accepted when he entered into the employer’s service.</p> <p>3. Where a boy seventeen years old employed as a mule driver outside of a coal mine in the daylight, has his employment changed so as to run a car by a lamp light inside the mine, and is injured five days after he starts in his new employment while stopping a car, he is entitled to have his case against his employer submitted to a jury, where it appears that the accident was caused by his attempting to stop the car within the mine in the same manner that he had stopped cars without, and that he had not been warned that such method was dangerous or instructed as to the proper manner of stopping the car.</p>