Jury Awards Widow $815,400 Against Crane Maker After Groundman Electrocuted by Power Line

On April 28, 1989, Gerald Lutz, 28, was killed outside Bozeman, Montana, when the cable of a crane he was working with touched a 7,200-volt power line. Lutz was a trained and licensed groundman for Montana Ready-Mix. He and his supervisor, crane operator Jim Lees, had been sent to Highway 191 to pick up drilling pipe that had spilled from a semitrailer. Each of the 40-foot pipes weighed 300 to 400 pounds.

The two men knew the power lines were overhead and that the crane's cable had no insulated link, a device that breaks the electrical path between the cable and the load. They planned the job with that in mind, setting a two-by-four on the ground to mark which pipes could be lifted safely and calling in a wrecker to drag the ones beneath the lines. Lutz's task was to hook chains, attached to the uninsulated cable, around the ends of the pipe and guide each piece to a waiting trailer. On the fatal lift, as the slack came out, the taut cable swung out of line with the boom tip and met the power line. Current ran down the cable and through the pipe to Lutz.

His widow, Lori Lutz, sued in March 1990 as personal representative of his estate, naming National Crane Corporation along with M & W Repair and Americo Trucking. The two other defendants settled, paying $110,000 between them, and National Crane went to trial alone. Her claim was strict liability in tort: a crane sold without an insulated link was defectively designed and unreasonably dangerous. Her lawyers, Monte Beck of Bozeman and Joe Bottomly of Kalispell, called experts who testified that insulated links were sold commercially, had not failed, and were feasible to build into the machine.

National Crane answered with two statutory defenses, misuse and assumption of risk, arguing that Lutz had dragged the load sideways from beneath the lines. The Gallatin County jury, in the Eighteenth Judicial District Court, returned a verdict of $815,400 for the estate. It put 20 percent of the fault on Lutz and 80 percent on the manufacturer. The district court cut the award by that 20 percent and by the settlement money and entered judgment for $542,320.

Both sides appealed. National Crane raised eighteen issues, which the Montana Supreme Court grouped into ten. In an opinion issued September 1, 1994, the court noted that the manufacturer itself admitted sideloading was reasonably foreseeable, so unreasonable misuse was not available as a defense. It held assumption of risk should not have gone to the jury either. It rejected the company's challenges to the plaintiff's experts, the jury instructions and the evidentiary rulings, and found one error, limits on questioning jurors, to be harmless.

The court sent the case back with instructions to remove Lutz's 20 percent share and reinstate the full $815,400 verdict, less the $110,000 already paid by the settling defendants.