Triple a MacHine Shop, Inc., a Corporation v. Waterman Steamship Corporation, a Corporation

Appellant, hereafter the repairer, appeals from a decree in admiralty holding it liable to appellee, hereafter the shipowner, for negligently causing a fire in the Number 1 hold of its steamship, Jean Lafitte, while it was at Pier 15 in the harbor of San Francisco. The vessel had been loaded in the Number 1 hold on the day before with Army clothing and supplies at an Army dock in the harbor of Oakland, Alameda, California. The negligence found is that the repairer’s two employees, in using an acetylene torch to burn off and remove an iron upright welded to the deck just aft of the Number 1 hatch handled it in such a manner that its sparks entered through the hatch, into Number 1 hold and started a fire in bales of the military clothing wrapped in gunny sacks and thereby damaged the structure of the vessel.

The repairer contends that the shipowner has not produced evidence to sustain its burden of proof that the proximate cause of the injury to the ship was by the torch’s sparks entering the hold through an aperture, admittedly the only method by which the torch could have caused the fire in the gunny-wrapped clothing.

It is not questioned that under and a few feet from where the…