Opinion ID: 1429035
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: subsurface water problem

Text: The district court found that Cook was entitled to recover for his additional costs necessitated by the wet site conditions which Defendants failed to disclose and misrepresented. Breach of duty to disclose and misrepresentation were the basis of Cook's second, third, ninth and twelfth causes of action [10] and thus the major portion of his claim for damages. [11] We begin our inquiry with a basic premise of contract law: Where one agrees to do, for a fixed sum, a thing possible to be performed, he will not be excused or become entitled to additional compensation because unforeseen difficulties are encountered. [12] The contract concededly required the removal of all subsurface and ground water on the construction site. [13] Its provisions would seem to command the work which is the subject matter of this suit, [14] but Cook urges that he is entitled to damages because the State, which knew that the site conditions were wet, failed to disclose all of its information to him before bidding. The project entailed the renovation of existing fish ponds. That fact alone, absent any specific site inspection provision, should have alerted a bidder to the possibility of wet conditions. Bidders on the project were admonished by the bid specifications to investigate and to determine soil conditions at the site. [15] They were confronted with not only a boilerplate inspection provision in printed form, but also with an invitation to attend two pre-bid conferences where the wet site conditions were discussed.
Cook urged below that, despite certain contract disclaimers, the State had an absolute duty to disclose in the contract plans and specifications its knowledge of any difficulties to be encountered. [16] The district court agreed, finding that it is customary in such industry to advise a contractor of any serious problems which will be encountered in the work, if known. Where a contract is complete in itself and is unambiguous, the contract's language is the only legitimate evidence of the parties' intent. [17] The trial court must first make the requisite finding of ambiguity before it can look at the custom of the industry to determine the parties' obligations. [18] Even though the result may be harsh, a party will be bound by the unambiguous terms of a contract. [19] Although the contract documents themselves did not furnish Cook with all the information the State possessed, he cannot maintain an actionable claim for concealment against a public hirer of a contractor unless either one of two tests is met: [1] there is a finding of misrepresentation [20] or [2] the facts allegedly withheld are not discoverable through the investigation contemplated by the contract. [21]
A contract clause which requires a contractor to rely upon its own inspection does not control when there is a finding of misrepresentation as to existing conditions. [22] The district court's finding of misrepresentation was based upon the 50 soil borings included in the contract plans and specifications. The court found that the extra work was caused by Cook's detrimental reliance upon test borings which Defendants submitted and did not indicate the actual moisture conditions. [23] This court faced the problem of misrepresentation in construction contracts in the 1931 case of Maney v. Oklahoma City. [24] In Maney a positive representation was made by the City that no rock was to be encountered except in negligible quantities. The defendant City was held responsible for the costs of the extra work caused by excavating the rock as the undisputed proof showed that the bidders did not have sufficient time to make their own borings. [25] The teaching in Maney suggests that, when the bidder is allowed insufficient time to make a personal study, the state cannot invoke exculpatory clauses to exonerate itself from liability. [26] Other jurisdictions have applied a variety of tests to a contractor's claim of misrepresentation in the public contract. [27] We adopt here the two-prong test of Robert E. McKee, Inc. v. City of Atlanta [28] which logically follows existing Oklahoma law. This test requires that either of two conditions must be present in a claim for recovery based on misrepresentation in a public construction contract [29]  (a) the bidder could not have discovered the correct facts about the conditions through reasonable investigation prior to the contract or (b) the underlying data actually provided to the bidder was inaccurate.