Court Opinion

ID: 9721802
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-26 09:09:48.990408+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:22:42.342326
License: Public Domain

HECHT, Justice
(concurring specially).
I write separately because, although I agree this case must be remanded to the commissioner, I cannot agree with one aspect of the majority’s interpretation of Iowa Code section 85.61(7)(a). The fighting issue in this case requires a determination whether Justin Faur sustained a personal injury “at any time from the time [he was] summoned to duty ... until the time [he was] discharged from duty by the chief of the volunteer fire department or the chiefs designee.” Iowa Code § 85.61(7)(a). The commissioner’s interpretation posited broadly that a volunteer firefighter can be summoned to duty under the statute by any circumstances that could lead a reasonable volunteer firefighter “to act in a manner consistent with the duties a volunteer firefighter assumes as regards the general public.” Accordingly, under the commissioner’s interpretation of the statute, the compensability of Faur’s claim as a volunteer firefighter does not turn on whether the pager sounded notice of the dispatcher’s call before Faur was injured by the gas in the atmosphere of the manure pit.
The majority rejects the commissioner’s interpretation. Repudiating the notion that a volunteer firefighter can be summoned to duty by mere circumstances, the majority concludes the legislature intended volunteer firefighters to be without workers’ compensation protection until “a third party authorized by the fire chief’ calls them to duty. I agree with this portion of the majority’s analysis as I believe the legislature clearly expressed the boundaries of “the course of employment.” The course commences on the front end with the issuance of a call to duty from an authorized person to members of the force *88(the act of “summoning”). In this case the summons was issued by a dispatcher sixty-eight seconds after a 911 call was placed at Faur’s direction. Although one witness testified that Faur could have made the return trip from the house to the pit in thirty seconds, another opined it would have taken Faur more than a minute to cover the distance because he was wearing knee-high “manure” boots and was winded as a consequence of the trip from the pit to the house. When he arrived back at the pit, he instructed the victim’s daughter to summon additional assistance before he began to climb down a piece of machinery into the nine-foot deep pit. In my view, a reasonable fact finder could on remand find that Faur sustained an injury after the dispatcher issued the summons to duty to Faur and the other members of the Andover Volunteer Fire Department who were available to respond to the emergency.
I write separately because I believe the majority’s interpretation of section 85.61(7)(u) adds to the statute language requiring a volunteer firefighter prove he or she received the department’s call to duty.6 This interpretation results in an embellishment of the words chosen by the legislature and is justified, the majority suggests, by a purpose to avoid an illogical, impractical, or absurd result. I strongly disagree.
There is nothing illogical, impractical, or absurd about an interpretation of the statute that commences the course of employment with an authorized person’s sounding of a call to action to members of a volunteer fire department who are available for duty. As the majority has acknowledged, the legislature chose to except these public servants from the operation of the going- and-coming rule. I view section 85.61(7)(a) as unmistakable evidence of a legislative purpose to expand the protection of the workers’ compensation statute. The majority’s interpretation of the statute contravenes this clear legislative purpose by adorning the statute with words (“receive” and “knowledge”) not expressed and, in my view, not intended by the legislature. This embellishment achieves a diminution of the zone of protection for volunteer firefighters, a result inconsistent with the legislative purpose, and I therefore reject it.
An interpretation of the statute that commences a volunteer firefighter’s course of employment with the employer’s sounding of a call to service is more faithful to the words chosen by the legislature and the clear legislative purpose to expand workers’ compensation protection for volunteers. The clear legislative purpose to expand the protection for volunteers who risk their lives in the service of others amply explains why the legislature chose to commence the course of employment in this context with the employer’s issuance of a call to service. This purpose is illustrated by the legislature’s omission of a requirement that the volunteer receive the call as a condition of commencement of the course of employment, an omission that does not result in such asymmetry as to produce illogical, impractical, or absurd results.7 The majority’s argument to the *89contrary uses a strained and inapt “straw-man” hypothetical in which a volunteer who is oblivious to the emergency for which he is imminently to be called to duty and is clearly unavailable to respond to the employer’s call to duty because he is not wearing a pager. I agree with the majority that a proper interpretation of the statute should not support the skier’s workers’ compensation claim because there is no basis upon which it could be reasonably concluded that the skier was responding to the department’s summons or otherwise serving the interests of the employer when the injury occurred. In sharp contrast, it was Faur who discovered the need for an emergency response while wearing his pager, caused the department to be alerted, and diligently positioned himself in the service of his employer to respond to the imminent page which sounded a mere sixty-eight seconds after the 911 call was received by the department’s dispatcher. Moreover, Faur knew the call to duty was imminent from the moment he caused the 911 call to be placed and during the entire time he travelled the 150-200 yards from the house to the pit. We should not attribute to the legislature the intent to shield Andover from liability for workers’ compensation benefits in the absence of proof that Faur either heard the pager sound or otherwise came to know it had sounded before he was injured while responding to the emergency for which the call to duty issued.
It seems perfectly logical that in furtherance of its purpose to expand the protection of volunteers, the legislature chose a bright-line “trigger” to commence the course of employment. The employer’s issuance of the call to duty to available volunteers is readily verifiable and therefore serves as a most practical trigger.8 Further, an interpretation that commences the course of employment with the issuance of the summons to duty provides protection for volunteers even when, sadly, as in Faur’s case, they are unavailable to testify on the question of whether they received the page, or otherwise came to know a summons was sent, before they were injured while clearly in the service of the employer.
The majority’s interpretation of the statute should be rejected for yet another reason. This court has in the past fifty years repeatedly affirmed that the workers’ compensation statute was enacted to benefit workers and their dependents and that it should, therefore, be interpreted “broadly and liberally in keeping with the humanitarian objective of the statute. We will not defeat the statute’s beneficent purpose by reading something into it that is not there, or by a narrow or strained construction.” Holstein Elec. v. Breyfogle, 756 N.W.2d 812, 815-16 (Iowa 2008); see also Stumpff v. Second Injury Fund, 543 N.W.2d 904, 905 (Iowa 1996); Barton v. Nevada Poultry Co., 253 Iowa 285, 289, 110 N.W.2d 660, 662 (1961). Reference to this long-standing rule is conspicuously omitted from the majority’s incompatible interpretive effort.9
The majority’s concern about extending workers’ compensation protection to any *90“Good Samaritan” seems far afield in this case. When Faur became aware of a victim’s peril, he was wearing his fire department pager and was therefore available to be summoned to duty at a location within the department’s coverage territory. His attempt to rescue the victim commenced only after he went to the nearby house and caused a 911 call to be placed, alerting his department and putting in motion the very protocol that culminated with the sounding of the alert to all available members of the rescue team, sixty-eight seconds later. Thus, as Faur travelled the 150-200 yards from the house back to the pit, he knew the pager summoning him to the rescue would soon sound. If the pager worn by Faur had not sounded before he arrived at the pit, he knew it would soon sound. If the pager did not sound as Faur climbed down into the pit in an effort to effect the rescue, he knew it would soon sound. That this court would attribute to the legislature an interpretation of section 85.61(7)(a) authorizing the commissioner to deny workers’ compensation protection to a volunteer firefighter under these circumstances absent proof that the volunteer received the paged call to duty or otherwise knew the summons to duty had issued before he was injured is completely unfathomable and produces a stunningly illogical, impractical, and absurd result which the majority opinion claims to renounce.10
For all of these reasons I concur with the conclusion that this case must be remanded to the commissioner but cannot join the majority’s interpretation of the statute.
WIGGINS and BAKER, JJ., join this special concurrence.

. This element of the claim is characterized elsewhere in the majority opinion as proof that the firefighter "acquire[d] knowledge that a summons to duty has been issued.”

. The majority finds support for its conclusion that the call to duty is triggered by a volunteer firefighter's receipt or knowledge of the call to duty in the phrase “the volunteer fire fighter is summoned to duty.” As volunteers are not called to duty individually, but rather jointly by common dispatch, I believe the majority gives the phrase a significance not intended by the legislature. In my view, the employer's act of issuing the summons to *89available volunteers triggers the course of employment.

. Pagers were chosen by the Andover Volunteer Fire Department as the means of summoning its members. I would apply the same reasoning had the department chosen telephones as its preferred means of communication.

. The majority acknowledges the “humanitarian objective of providing compensation for injured workers,” but fails in my view to liberally construe the statute as our case law commits us to do.

. Even under the majority’s erroneous interpretation of the statute, I believe this record engenders a fact question as to whether Faur received the call to duty or had knowledge of the call to duty before he was injured. The call to duty sounded a mere sixty-eight seconds after the 911 call was received. As I have noted above, one witness opined the return trip from the house to the pit would have taken more than a minute. There is evidence in the record from which a reasonable fact finder could find Faur paused to give an instruction to Johnson’s daughter before he began to climb down into the pit. In addition to the reasonable inferences from this direct evidence, circumstantial evidence could support a finding that additional time passed as Faur climbed down into the nine-foot deep pit on a piece of machinery to begin the fatal rescue attempt, thus allowing the summons to duty to issue and be received by Faur before the injury occurred.