Court Opinion

ID: 9806962
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 19:40:29.207371+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T11:17:25.213460
License: Public Domain

Order, Supreme Court, New York County (Barbara Jaffe, J.), entered December 9, 2013, which, granted defendants/third-party plaintiffs Consolidated Edison, Inc. and Consolidated Edison Company of New York, Inc.’s (collectively, Con Ed) motion to renew, and upon renewal, adhered to a prior order, same court and Justice, entered June 18, 2013, denying Con Ed’s motion to compel defendant/third-party defendant Team Industrial Services, Inc. to produce its file related to another action (the Diamond Shamrock litigation), modified, on the law, to grant the motion to compel, and otherwise affirmed, without costs. Appeal from order entered June 18, 2013, dismissed as moot, without costs. Appeal from order, same court and Justice, entered December 31, 2013, which denied as moot Con Ed’s motion to, among other things, compel compliance with the court’s order entered April 26, 2013, dismissed, without costs.
The words “material and necessary,” as used in CPLR 3101 (a) are “to be interpreted liberally to require disclosure ... of any facts bearing on the controversy” (Allen v Crowell-Collier Publ. Co., 21 NY2d 403, 406 [1968]). “The weight to be given evidence of other [lawsuits or claims] on the issues of notice and causation, and indeed the very admissibility of such evidence . . . are not of concern in the context of disclosure” (Mendelowitz v Xerox Corp., 169 AD2d 300, 307 [1st Dept 1991] [modifying order to permit discovery of prior lawsuits and claims alleging exposure to asbestos as the result of the use of the defendant’s copy machines]).
In our view, the motion court applied too harsh a standard in determining that documents concerning the prior Diamond Shamrock incident are not discoverable. We are not concerned with the ultimate admissibility of the evidence at trial, but with the discovery of information concerning the prior incident, as to which a more liberal standard applies (see Dattmore v Eagan Real Estate, 112 AD2d 800, 800 [4th Dept 1985] [permitting discovery of records concerning prior accidents, noting that even if they are ultimately found to be inadmissible, “this is not the test for disclosure under CPLR 3101 (a), which is to be liberally construed”]). The motion court’s reliance on cases involving the exclusion of testimony or the evaluation of evidence submitted in opposition to a defendant’s motion for sum*556mary judgment underscores that it applied a more restrictive standard in evaluating the discoverability of evidence concerning Diamond Shamrock and other incidents (see e.g. Gjonaj v Otis El. Co., 38 AD3d 384 [1st Dept 2007]; Nichols v Cummins Engine Co., 273 AD2d 909 [4th Dept 2000], lv denied 96 NY2d 703 [2001]).
As even the motion court recognized, third-party defendant’s excess application of leak sealant was a contributing factor in both the steam pipe explosion at Lexington Avenue and 41st Street and the incident at the Diamond Shamrock refinery in Texas. Diamond Shamrock’s expert opined that injection of sealant caused a stress overload fracture of the outlet nozzle; and the team’s senior technical specialist admitted that they had pumped far more sealant into the enclosure box at the refinery than it was capable of holding. The expert opined that the stress applied by third-party defendant’s technicians during injection of sealant into the closure caused the rupture of the valve and the resulting explosion. Con Edison, in this case, alleges that excess application of sealant caused blockages of steam traps, preventing the removal of condensed steam from inside the steam main, and leading to a “water hammer” which caused the main to rupture. The precipitating causes and the circumstances surrounding both incidents are sufficiently similar so as to warrant discovery concerning the prior incident.
Con Edison is entitled to “all matter material and necessary” to its claims and defenses, including the 48 bankers’ boxes of Diamond Shamrock documents that have yet to be produced. Con Edison’s independent efforts to obtain publicly-available documents, whether through record searches or Freedom of Information Act requests, do not extinguish third-party defendant’s obligations to comply with the CPLR.
To the extent Con Edison seeks documents regarding incidents occurring more than five years before the steam pipe explosion at issue here, they never appealed from the court’s April 26, 2013 order denying that request.
To the extent Con Edison seeks compliance with the April 26, 2013 order directing Team to produce records of incidents involving excessive application of sealant or the use of sealant that caused or contributed to the failure or disruption of any customer’s equipment within five years of the accident giving rise to this litigation, or, if no such records exist, a detailed affidavit explaining its search for such records, Con Edison failed to appeal from that aspect of the December 31, 2013 order denying its request to compel as moot. Accordingly, its request is not properly before this Court.
Concur — Acosta, Saxe and Manzanet-Daniels, JJ.