Court Opinion

ID: 9637243
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 15:01:08.821665+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:09:54.566108
License: Public Domain

McEWEN, Judge,
dissenting.
Since the author of the majority Opinion embraces the benchmark principles established in Ortiz v. Ra-El Development Corp., 365 Pa.Super. 48, 528 A.2d 1355 (1987), allo. denied Ortiz v. Ra-El Development Corp., 517 Pa. 608, 536 A.2d 1332 (1987), as pronounced by our colleague upon this *91panel, it behooves mention at the outset that I, too, clasp closely those basic rules. It is the application of those rules to the instant complaint and the resulting judgment on the pleadings that triggers my disagreement.
It has long been a general principle that the employer of an independent contractor is not liable for the physical harm caused to another by an act or omission of the contractor, in this case Danella Line Services. Restatement (Second) of Torts § 409. The Restatement provides in Sections 416 and 427 for exceptions to this general principle when the work poses a “peculiar risk” or a “special danger”. Both the general principle and the exceptions recited by the Restatement have become well-settled law in Pennsylvania, and our esteemed colleague, Judge Phyllis W. Beck, defined those exceptions in precise and certain terms when she declared for this Court that a “special danger” or “peculiar risk” exists where:
the risk is foreseeable to the employer of the independent contractor at the time the contract is executed, ie., a reasonable person, in the position of the employer, would foresee the risk and recognize the need to take special measures; and
the risk is different from the usual and ordinary risk associated with the general type of work done, ie., the specific project or task chosen by the employer involves circumstances that are substantially out-of-the-ordinary.
Ortiz v. Ra-El Development Corp., supra at 53, 528 A.2d at 1358.
It is undisputed that appellant was an employee of Danella Line Services and that Bell contracted with Danella Line Services to perform line work. It was during the course of that employment that appellant asserts he “was caused to fall from a ladder while high up on a utility pole”. Appellant asserts in his complaint that the work was hazardous and dangerous and that Bell should have realized that the nature of the work created “a peculiar risk of physical harm”.
Simply put, appellant asserted in the complaint that the work he was called upon to perform involved a “peculiar risk” *92and I am unwilling to dismiss his suit because he did not also plead that the “peculiar risk” was “ ‘substantially’ out of the ordinary risk”. The case had proceeded only through the pleading stage and discovery had not yet commenced when the trial court granted judgment on the pleadings. However usual and ordinary Bell may have viewed the risk associated with the line work for which it hired Danella, or however usual and ordinary the risk of a fall from a ladder in the usual tasks of line work, there was no evidence that enables a judicial conclusion that the particular task which appellant was performing at the time of his fall did not involve the “peculiar risk” which the law requires and appellant pleaded. I simply cannot assume that the work being performed by appellant was the routine effort of a lineman and did not involve, in view of his assertion in the complaint that the work involved a “peculiar risk”, a “substantially out-of-the-ordinary risk”. It may well be that discovery will disclose that the assignment and the duties of appellant at the time of the accident were of the general type of work of a lineman, thereby posing the ordinary risks associated with the job of lineman, but appellant should not, in my view, be foreclosed from an evidentiary demonstration that the task involved circumstances so out of the ordinary that it posed “a peculiar risk of physical harm”.