Stewart v. Balfour

Citations

• 51 Wash. 127
• 98 P. 103
• 1908 Wash. LEXIS 981

Syllabus

<p>Master and Servant — Injuries—Fellow Servants — Servants of Other Employer. Employees of a wheat shipper, engaged on the wharf in delivering sacks of wheat into a chute for loading a ship, are not “loaned” to the stevedores having the contract for loading the ship merely because they are under the direction of the stevedores’ workmen, and so are not fellow servants of an employee of the stevedores engaged on the ship in receiving the sacks and loading the ship.</p> <p>Master and Servant — Injuries—-Fall of Sack in Loading Ship —Contributory Negligence — Unsafe Method — Evidence — Sufficiency. An employee of stevedores loading a wheat ship, thrown down from a ladder by the fall of a wheat sack from the dock chute, is guilty of contributory negligence, as a matter of law, precluding any recovery for negligence in placing the sack in the chute, where it appears that he mounted the ladder to place a riffle in the chute while sacks were coming down at the rate of twenty per minute, that sacks frequently fall from the chute, and that he might have directed the men to cease throwing in sacks while he was placing the riffle, and his use of the ladder at all was unusual and unnecessarily dangerous, and a safer way was well known to him.</p> <p>Same — Assumption of Risks. In such a case, the plaintiff assumes the risk from the falling of a sack, which he knew happened several times a day, whether the same was due to negligence in placing the sacks in the chute or other causes.</p>