Court Opinion

ID: 9865879
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-25 23:38:40.575278+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T14:01:49.545481
License: Public Domain

ELLIOTT, Judge
(dissenting).
The facts in this ease present a question of liability for injuries sustained by a Iboy who climbed a tree which stands within a private inclosure and through the limbs of which the defendant Louisiana Public Utilities Company erected and maintain a high-powered wire not insulated. The wire was erected and is maintained with the consent of the owner of the ground. Children living in the neighborhood play within the inclosure with the tacit consent of the owner of the premises. The attraction for the injured boy up the tree was a bird which he saw and not the wire, which it is likely he never observed. He accidentally fell out of the tree, and in falling came in contact with the wire and was severely burned.
Under the circumstances, developed by the facts, it does not appear to me that there was fault and negligence on the part of defendant in not insulating its wire through the tree as a precaution against injury resulting from an accident of the kind that happened. The wire was fully 20 feet above the ground, and could not be reached except by climbing the tree. The accident was something which defendant, as a matter of prudence and care, should not be held to have looked forward to and guarded against by insulating its wire through the tree. The theory of liability under the facts of this ease seems to me to be inconsistent with the provisions of title 5, chapter 2 (arts. 2315-2324), of our Civil Code on the subject of quasi offenses.
In New Orleans & N. E. R. R. Co. v. McEwen & Murray and Gulf Lumber Co., 49 La. Ann. 1184, page 1196, 22 So. 675, 680, 38 L. R. A. 134, the Supreme Court quoted with approval the following definition of negligence: “Negligence consists in a failure to provide against the ordinary occurrences of life, and the fact that the provision made is insufficient as against an event such as may happen once in a lifetime or perhaps twice in a century, does not, in my opinion, make out a case of negligence upon which an action in damages will lie.”
The facts in the present case seem to me to bring the case within the’ principle on which was based our opinion in the case Fuscia v. Central Light & Power Co., 2 La. App. 195. We held in that case, under facts which do not to me seem different in principle from the present, that negligence could not be imputed to the defendant for having run and maintained a high-powered ’wire through the limbs of a tree against which a boy fell and was injured, with facts about like the present. In the Fuseia Case the wire was not insulated through the tree; the opinion does not say so, but; if the wire had been insulated, the boy would not have been injured.
I think the Fuseia Case was properly decided, and that the reason on which it is based should be followed in the' present case. I think the judgment appealed from herein should be reversed and plaintiffs’ demand rejected.
I therefore dissent.