Fourth Circuit Clears Path for Negligence Claim

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals today reversed a decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina and held that an electricity company's alleged failure to abide by statutory and regulatory guidelines for terminating service for nonpayment may have been the proximate cause of a house fire.  In Graham v. Progress Energy, Inc., the plaintiffs contended that Progress Energy disconnected their electricity without providing prior notice or offering a deferred payment plan.  In the absence of electrical power, the plaintiffs opted to use candles to illuminate their home.  However, the plaintiffs failed to extinguish the candles before falling asleep and, consequently, the home caught on fire. 

The plaintiffs sued Progress Energy for negligence in shutting off the electricity, claiming that Progress Energy breached a duty to the plaintiffs (i.e., by allegedly not abiding by statutes and regulations pertaining to the termination of services for nonpayment), and that the breach of that alleged duty was the proximate cause of the fire.  Progress Energy did not dispute causation-in-fact, but argued that the plaintiffs' actions in lighting candles and forgetting to extinguish them was an intervening, independent cause of the fire.  Progress Energy was successful with this argument at the district court level, but the Fourth Circuit reversed, holding that the fire caused by the use of candles for illumination was not an unforeseeable consequence of shutting off the plaintiff's electricity.

Remarkably, courts differ about whether house fires resulting from unattended candles is a foreseeable consequence of terminating electricity service.  Some courts have held that while it is foreseeable that persons without electricity service will use candles to illuminate their home, it is not foreseeable that they will leave those candles unattended.  This is the better conclusion.  The holding that a third party who creates circumstances in which someone "might" act negligently and injure themselves should not be enough to render the circumstances the proximate cause of the injury.  After all, under the Fourth Circuit's reasoning, the estate of a person who is electrocuted by misusing a hair dryer in the bathtub could argue that a contractor who installed the electrical outlets in the person's bathroom proximately caused the injury since it would be "foreseeable" that someone "might" use the plugs for an improper purpose.  The better analysis would require a court to examine the remoteness of the allegedly wrongful conduct to the injury.