Opinion ID: 2631225
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: anatomy of the case

Text: ¶ 2 AEC, a rural electrical utility company, hired a construction company, O & M Power Line Construction Co. (O & M), to replace power-line poles on the cooperative's easement. The poles were located in a drought-stricken area. During the construction O & M's truck started a fire that engulfed the grass beneath it and then quickly spread far and wide. The resulting conflagration damaged over seventy-seven thousand acres of range land. ¶ 3 Landowners affected by the fire brought a class action against both AEC and the construction company. In the course of trial proceedings the nisi prius court refused to give a jury instruction, requested by the landowners, which would have exposed AEC to liability for the construction company's negligence. The jury returned a verdict for AEC and the landowners appealed. ¶ 4 The Court of Civil Appeals reversed, holding that  as a matter of law  AEC had a nondelegable duty to use its easements in a non-negligent manner regardless of whether harm resulted from work done by one who was an independent contractor. In today's pronouncement the court holds that the benefits of the servient estate owner's nondelegable duty extends solely to the dominant estate holder and no one else. The court's opinion, which severely restricts the outer limit of the law's five-hundred-year-old nondelegable duty concept that is applicable here, overlooks the dispositive issue  that of the essence of AEC's liability qua a franchised utility. Today's pronouncement ignores AEC's status as a public service company and refuses to impose upon it a nondelegable duty of due care in laying transmission lines. The degree of care that is attached by law to the interaction of servient with dominant estate holders, inter se, is irrelevant to the point here in contest. I hence recede from the court's view, implicit in today's holding, that a rural electric cooperative, qua public service utility, does not owe to the public a nondelegable duty of ordinary care in erecting and maintaining its transmission facilities. II