Court Opinion

ID: 9476148
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 05:48:13.92866+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:45:08.218898
License: Public Domain

McMILLAN, District Judge,
dissenting in part and concurring in part:
The majority opinion does an admirable job of analyzing and declaring the state of the court decisions on the doctrine of impossibility of performance.
*1104However, I believe that the District Court takes that law into account and that although he did not fully articulate a classic statement of the law, he reached the right result for the right reasons and ought to be affirmed.
Evening opera on an indoor stage obviously requires power and lights. Supplying power and lights was a necessary part of Wolf Trap’s undertaking, a cost figured into their charges for the facility.
The financing and the preparation for the delivery of the essential power required nothing esoteric, inspirational, unforeseeable or expensive.
Mr. Craig Hankenson, a representative of Wolf Trap who apparently negotiated the contract, made a detailed statement about the situation immediately after the cancellation of the concert. On pertinent matters, his statement included the following:
From my experience in theatres with which I have been affiliated prior to Wolf Trap, I know it is possible to install at the main service panel for the theatre a switchover system so that within 10 minutes an external portable generator or an emergency stage lighting generator can provide emergency service for minimal theatrical lighting and sound. This is not a major investment.
Generally every region of the country has a civil defense program which has stationed somewhere in its region a large portable generator. Prior arrangement can be made with the Civil Defense so that in emergencies, such as ours, the generator, which is usually on a trailer, could be transported to the rear of the Theatre.
In my opinion a far better solution though it is a capital investment of some size is to have a generator of sufficient capacity to deliver power to our stage so that we can carry on a performance with minimal interruption, though we would certainly have to compromise with less than the full lighting and sound which was designed for that performance.
It is my feeling that a theater without this capacity is incomplete. I attach a memo to Claire which I wrote last summer voicing this opinion along with her response.
My memo addressed two equally critical issues: public safety and the ability to continue the performance. Her reply seems to be based solely on public safety and a very “let’s wait to see it if it ever happens and then maybe we’ll do something” attitude.
The facts are that we have experienced power outages on several occasions. It is perhaps a matter of opinion as to how many occurrences can be called frequent. There have been many other occasions of power outage at Wolf Trap has been very lucky they did not occur during the evening when the performance would have been affected. It can perhaps be said that tonight, too we were lucky. What if the failure had occurred after 9:30 in the middle of the performance in darkness?
I recommend that this situation be addressed immediately. The cost to the Foundation, the Park Service and the Opera Company of Boston for the evening’s cancellation would go along way if not all the way toward providing emergency backup equipment to prevent such a recurrence.
[Emphasis. added.]
From this evidence, the trial court could rationally have concluded, and did obviously conclude, that performance of this contract was not “impossible”; that power failures were not only foreseeable in an abstract sense, but were, in fact, inevitable; that a theater without emergency capacity to carry on in case of a power outage is “incomplete”; that Hankenson had advised “Claire,” chairman of the theater board, of this opinion during the previous summer; that power outages had occurred on several previous occasions; that “Wolf Trap has been very lucky they did not occur during the evening when the performance would have been affected”; and that the “cost to the Foundation, the Park Service and the Opera Company of Boston for the evening’s cancellation would go along [sic] *1105way if not all the way toward providing emergency backup equipment to prevent such a recurrence.”
It would have taken only a few seconds to write into the contract a sentence which said, in effect, “If the electric power fails, Wolf Trap will not be responsible for any losses caused by the power failure.”
If the parties had agreed to such a provision I would not raise my voice.
They did not so agree.
I do not think we should write for the defendant a defense it did not write for itself.
I would affirm the decision of the trial court.