Court Opinion

ID: 6411571
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2022-06-25 11:53:05.567827+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:51:23.535939
License: Public Domain

Merrick, J.
In support of their objection to the direction which was given to the jury, and to the right of the plaintiffs to recover a verdict for any sum of money whatever upon the facts set forth in the report, the defendants assert and attempt to maintain, first, that in obtaining the insurance upon their stock the plaintiffs warranted that it then was, and thereafter should continue to be, contained in their store described in the policy; and secondly, that the stock which was injured was not contained therein at the time of the occurrence of the fire.
It is unnecessary to discuss or even to notice the first of these propositions, because there appears to be an entire failure to substantiate the second, without which it is not pretended that the former can afford any defence to the plaintiffs’ action. All the plaintiffs’ stock was in their store, just as the defendants contend they warranted that it should be, when the partition between their own and the adjoining store began to give way. That was the commencement of one common and general disaster. The fire, and the falling of the walls and of other parts of the two stores, which immediately followed, were not separate and independent events, but were merely parts and successive circumstances in the progress of a single calamity. Though the cause and origin of the fire may perhaps be satisfactorily conjectured, *162t ie precise moment when it was kindled is not known ; bat the interval which elapsed before it was discovered, after the crash of the buildings had been heard, was certainly very brief. The witnesses who testified of it varied in their estimate of its durati 3n from fifteen to forty minutes. This slight difference of opinion on a mere matter of judgment of the lapse of time is really of no importance. The material fact is, that the flames bloke out and burned the plaintiffs’ goods before there could have been any possible interposition for their safety, and must thus be considered as having occurred substantially at the same time with the other incidents of the disaster. They were all blended together in one catastrophe, and constituted a single ev ent, upon a due consideration of which the rights of all parties are to be determined.
As it is thus shown that the defendants cannot maintain one of the two propositions, both of which are indispensable to susta n their objection, the direction to the jury to return a verdict fo • the plaintiffs was correct, and judgment must accordingly be entered upon it.

Judgment on the verdict for the plaintiffs.