“Neither is [this case] within those classes . . . where a secondary efficient cause intervenes to break the chain of causation and so becomes the sole proximate cause of the injury.”
How later courts described this case
- “Neither is [this case] within those classes . . . where a secondary efficient cause intervenes to break the chain of causation and so becomes the sole proximate cause of the injury.”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
MOORMAN, Circuit Judge
(dissenting).
In my opinion the application of the correct rule of proximate result to this case requires an affirmance. Had the gas exploded spontaneously, there would be an unbroken chain between the negligence and the injury. Had it attracted the lightning, the chain of causation would still he complete. In either case the explosion would be the direct or, as sometimes said, the natural consequence of the defendant’s negligence, and thus the proximate result. But the factual ease is different. The g-as was inactive or dormant, and a new outside force intervened and caused the explosion. This seems to me to make the defendant’s negligence remote unless it created a situation, where there was foreseeable danger of the intervention of, the new force. Beale, The Proximate Consequences of an Act, 33 Harvard Law Review 632. I think the danger was not foreseeable. Thunderstorms, it is true, do come, lightning does strike, a,nd men do take out insurance against these risks. So do men run trains into open switches (Pere Marquette Ry. Co. v. Haskins, 62 F.(2d) 806 (6 C. C. A.) and automobiles into railway ears standing on highways (Orton v. Pennsylvania R. Co., 7 F.(2d) 36 (6 C. C. A.). Many tilings happen that reasonable foresight cannot anticipate; and so it is that a foreseeable thing is not that which has happened or may happen again but which “could reasonably have been foreseen in the light of all the attending circumstances.” I think a stroke of lightning is beyond the scope of this expectation.