Court Opinion

ID: 9707780
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 02:21:05.892141+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:38.092861
License: Public Domain

SHARPNACK, C.J.,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
I concur in the majority’s conclusion that Pepper was not entitled to summary judgment on the issue of whether it had assumed a duty to inspect and maintain the scaffold. The designated evidence reveals a clear dispute of fact as to whether Pepper employees were involved in the installation of the vis-queen.
However, I respectfully dissent from the majority’s conclusion that the failure of House to remove the pipe from their work area was not, as a matter of law, a proximate cause of Collins’s injury. The majority correctly states that the issue of proximate cause is generally determined by the trier of fact. Perryman v. Huber, Hunt & Nichols, Inc., 628 N.E.2d 1240, 1245 (Ind.Ct.App.1994), trans. denied. Nevertheless, the majority concludes that this case involves a situation “where it is clear that the injury was not foreseeable under the circumstances and that the imposition of liability upon the original negligent actor would not be justified.” As a result, the majority holds that House’s act of leaving the pipe in the area was not a proximate cause of Collins’s injury as a matter of law. I disagree.
Considering the facts most favorable to Collins, House left scrap pipe in its work area although it had contractually agreed to maintain the work area clear of debris.10 The foreseeable risk from the breach of this duty would certainly include someone either tripping over the pipe, falling on the pipe, or experiencing some other unfortunate contact with the pipe. This is, in fact, the type of accident that produced Collins’s injury.
Nevertheless, the majority concludes that the negligent installation of the visqueen on the scaffold was an intervening cause which broke the chain of causation thereby relieving House of liability. I believe the majority has misapplied this doctrine to the facts of this case. In Lutheran Hosp. of Indiana, Inc. v. Blaser, this court explained that “[t]he question of proximate cause depends upon whether the independent, negligent act could have been reasonably expected under the circumstances to intervene in such a way as to likely produce an injury similar to the one that occurred.” Lutheran Hosp. of Indiana, Inc. v. Blaser, 634 N.E.2d 864, 871 (Ind.Ct.App.1994) (emphasis added), reh’g denied. In other words, the original tort fea-sor is relieved of liability for an injury where the subsequent negligent act was outside the original tort feasor’s scope of foreseeable risk. Id. at 872. To illustrate the subtleties of this rule, the Lutheran court compared the facts of two cases where proximate cause was found to be absent:
“In Crull, the manufacturer risked an electrical fire, the plaintiff suffered a gas explosion after the repair person failed to connect the gas line; in Walker, the landowner’s [sic] risked a car hitting the cow; the plaintiff suffered a ear hitting another car. However, in the case at bar, Lutheran created an unsafe condition, and risked a car hitting a pedestrian at the ‘exit’ of the parking lot. This was precisely the accident which occurred, thus the conduct [hit-and-run driver] which produced Blaser’s injuries was within Lutheran’s scope of foreseeable risks.”
Id. at 872 (comparing Crull v. Platt, 471 N.E.2d 1211 (Ind.Ct.App.1984), reh’g denied, trans. denied, and Walker v. Jones, 511 N.E.2d 507 (Ind.Ct.App.1987)). Applying this reasoning to the facts here, Collins’s injury was foreseeable not because House was expected to anticipate that someone would enter the building through the window opening because of billowing visqueen, but because House, by not keeping the area free *578of debris, created a risk that someone would suffer injury by coming into contact with the scrap pipe.11
The majority cites Woods v. Qual-Craft Indus., Inc., as support for its conclusion that proximate cause is absent here. Woods v. Qual-Craft Indus., Inc., 648 N.E.2d 1198 (Ind.Ct.App.1995). I find Woods to be distinguishable from this case in that the concrete slabs left uncovered in the dug out area were placed there before the scaffold was erected. Thus, the risk of someone falling from a high altitude and onto the slabs was not foreseeable at the time the concrete slabs were left. In the present case, the risk of harm that someone would fall on the pipe would be present even before the bricklayers installed their scaffold because the risk was not that someone would fall from the top of a scaffold but that someone would fall on the pipe. Therefore, although subtle, this factual distinction renders Woods illustrative but ultimately inapplicable to the proximate cause analysis in this case.
In sum, I disagree with the majority’s holding that the lack of foreseeability in this case is so clear that it necessitates a holding that there is no proximate cause as a matter of law. This issue is best determined by the trier of fact following a thorough consideration of all of the relevant facts and surrounding circumstances. Therefore, I would reverse the trial court’s grant of summary judgment with respect to both House and Pepper on this issue.

. Because the majority disposed of the issue of negligence by concluding that Collins's claim failed on the proximate cause element, it did not resolve the issue of whether House and Pepper had a duty to Collins under these facts. Considering the provisions in the hospital’s contracts with House and Pepper regarding housekeeping, safety, and OSHA standards, I would hold that both House and Pepper had a contractual duty to Collins to keep House's work areas clean. See Perryman, 628 N.E.2d at 1244 (holding that where the contract affirmatively shows the parties’ intent to charge one party with a duty of care, actionable negligence may be predicated upon that contractual duty).

. Although I do not think the manner in which Collins came to fall on the pipe in this case is ' determinative, I cannot say from the designated evidence that is was unforeseeable that someone working on the exterior of a building on a scaffold would enter the building, because of an emergency or otherwise, through a window opening. Clearly, when the structure of a scaffold several levels high becomes unstable, entering the building through such an opening might be the only obvious escape route. Based on the designated evidence before us, I conclude that it was not unforeseeable that brick layers working on an exterior scaffold would use a window opening as a means of ingress or egress, thereby exposing them to scrap pipe left by a contractor working on that floor.