On a $5 dare from friends, 13-year-old Justin Porter climbed 35 feet up an electric transmission tower. Who was to know such an adventure might prove dangerous? 19,700 volts later, his mother, Anna Thebeau, is suing the electric utility, Ameren, saying it should have fenced off the tower against trespassers, should have posted a big warning sign on it, should have designed it so that it could not be climbed up, and should have insulated the wires far overhead. (Jim Suhr, “Ameren asks judge to toss lawsuit over boy who fell from tower”, AP/Bloomington, Ill., Pantagraph, Jun. 12; Steve Gonzalez, “Boy was negligent in climbing power pole, Ameren argues”, Madison County Record, Jun. 11; Brian Noggle (“Because teenagers heed all signs and obey all posted rules”), May 13, 2005). More zapped pylon-climbers here and here (& welcome Michelle Malkin readers).
Climbed electric tower on dare
On a $5 dare from friends, 13-year-old Justin Porter climbed 35 feet up an electric transmission tower. Who was to know such an adventure might prove dangerous? 19,700 volts later, his mother, Anna Thebeau, is suing the electric utility, Ameren, saying it should have fenced off the tower against trespassers, should have posted a big […]
14 Comments
Not all of us were raised in “pop the collar” yuppie neighborhoods. Some of us as kids took risks. This is NO surprise at all to utility owner or anyone who grew up in a small town.
The only thing surprising is that some poor parent finally dragged their kids away from the TV, the x-box 360, and the Wii.
Making these poles innacessible to the naive, the ignorant, or the just plain stupid doesn’t seem like an unreasonable burden to me.
It’s called a fence. A big one, with no tresspassing sings…maybe even a few motion sensitive lights and alarms.
Clearly, a leading candidate for a Darwin award. All the more oxygen for the rest of us…
The stupid kid and family should be happy the kid is still alive. I guess no Darwin Award for him this time around.
Dear John, a 19700 volt 35 foot tower is not one of the big long distance transmission lines. It is most likely a neighborhood thing, probably not the one down every street, but just the neighborhood feeder. So, you want fences and signs around every power pole? Be reasonable, what happened to personal responsibility? Besides, when did signs and fences ever stop a kid or a lawsuit?
A fence around every tower? Are you kidding? What’s next, a fence around every pole? Around every pond? Some things are apparently dangerous, even to a 13 year old. How high does the fence have to be? Should it be electric as well? Geesh.
Since when was it the electric company’s responsibility to protect people from stupidity?
I mean, the wires are elevated in the first place to prevent all but the most foolish from getting to them!
Bringing this suit shows the whole country where the kid got his lack of brainpower.
It’s worth noting as well that those lines are held by foot or two foot long insulators. To require sufficient insulation to contain 20kV (which is neighborhood distribution, not big lines) would require quite a bit of extra weight on the lines. Exactly how much more do we want to pay for our electricity?
The article doesn’t mention if he won the $5.
Put a fence around the towers and the company will just get sued by someone who gets hurt climbing the fence. There is a real simple solution to all of this. We need a law that removes the right to sue from someone who was hurt or killed during the commission of a crime. As soon as that kid started up the tower he was guilty of trespass and his right to sue should have been declared null.
Stupid, stupid kid.
I have no sympathy for him or his mom, and the lawsuit needs to be thrown out. If you’re stupid enough to trespass on private property and climb a 25,000-volt tower, you should live with the consequences without having somebody else (or a lot of somebody elses) pay for it.
This boy should get the Darwin Award of the century.
“This boy should get the Darwin Award of the century.”
You obviously aren’t familiar with previous winners of Darwin Awards; what this kid did barely rates at all on THAT scale of stupidity.
This is an example of both of the two types of product liability suits that infuriate me the most.
The first kind is the case where someone says, with a straight face, that if you had only warned them they would not have come to some harm, but either the harm was totally obviously the expected result of their own stupidity or the warning would clearly not have made any difference.
For example, there’s the person who sued because his bunk bed had no warning that falling off the top bunk could cause injury. Gravity is a well-known hazard.
The second type are people who sue because of a product design choice that results in harm but where the design choice is sensible from an engineering point of view. Perhaps it would have been quite simple and inexpensive to prevent the particular harm that befell the litigant, but there might be hundreds of other ways a person might get harmed, and preventing all of them would triple the cost of the product or otherwise be impossible.
This is very common in automotive product liability suits. The claim in this case that these electrical wires should have be insulated seems like one nobody could make with a straight face.
Really the first type of suit is also an example of suits of the second type. You can’t warn about every possible thing that could happen, and if you try to, the really important warnings get lost in the unimportant ones.
A fence around the fence?
Require all such settlements to be a direct charge on the customer bills.
No, better idea: Send the winner of a settlement over such suits as this . . . the bill to fix the “problem” (i.e. how much did it cost to block off access to the utility tower?)