Court Opinion

ID: 9803022
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-31 15:14:10.513809+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T10:02:34.563468
License: Public Domain

Manzanet-Daniels, J.,
dissents in a memorandum as follows: Petitioner was the first emergency responder to a fire in a multilevel, single room occupancy residential building fire at 3:24 a.m. on April 23, 2008. He parked his vehicle and ran into the smoke-filled building, and was evacuating dozens of tenants through narrow, smoked-filled hallways and down stairwells when the fire department arrived on the scene.
Petitioner exited the building, encountering a chaotic, crowded rescue scene. Petitioner was instructed by fire department personnel to move his vehicle from the front of the building. As petitioner made his way toward the vehicle, a fire hose was unexpectedly “charged,” or filled with water, causing it to jump off the ground, and petitioner, who was attempting to step over the hose, to trip and fall. It is undisputed that petitioner suffered a wrist fracture so severe that he was found to be permanently disabled for full police work.
The majority now affirms the decision of the motion court denying petitioner an ADR pension, reasoning that his injury was not the result of a service-related “accident.” I cannot countenance such constrictive reasoning, nor its result.
*422The contemporaneous evidence establishes that petitioner tripped and fell over a fire hose that unexpectedly “charged” while he attempted to comply with the fire department’s directive to move his vehicle (see Matter of Meyer v Board of Trustees of N.Y. City Fire Dept., Art. 1-B Pension Fund, 90 NY2d 139, 147 [1997]). This event constitutes “a sudden, fortuitous mischance, unexpected, out of the ordinary, and injurious in impact” (Matter of Starnella v Bratton, 92 NY2d 836, 838 [1998] [internal quotation marks omitted]).
A trip and fall occasioned by a fire hose, in the middle of a chaotic rescue scene, cannot be characterized as a misstep in the ordinary course of employment, as the majority finds. Petitioner did not fall down a flight of stairs, like the petitioner in Starnella, but encountered an unexpected and non-stationary object in the midst of a chaotic, frenetic scene, making the case more similar to Matter of Flannelly v Board of Trustees of N.Y. City Police Pension Fund (278 AD2d 113 [1st Dept 2000] [officer’s trip and fall over a tangle of television and VCR wires in police locker room, while performing routine security inspection, constituted a service-related accident as a matter of law]).
The fact that a police officer may have familiarity with fire scenes generally, or has responded to fire scenes in the past, is not the equivalent of familiarity or knowledge of a particular fire scene sufficient to render the placement or movement of objects “expected”; each fire scene is different and none are stationary or controlled. The majority’s decision has the effect of penalizing an officer who, with no thought to his own health or safety, evacuated residents from a burning building, and will dissuade first responders in the future from taking similar heroic action.