I do so love stories like this.
"Hindsight, Of Course, Is A Marvelous Thing"
by Randy Cassingham
John Kincannon, 46, was a successful attorney. He practiced real
estate law in Irvine, Calif., and was a "prominent litigator", said the
Kincannon's family attorney, Wylie A. Aitken.
Kincannon lived in a nice Orange County house with the requisite
swimming pool. He was not above cleaning it himself, either. One day,
he was skimming debris from his pool with a net on a long metal pole
when he noticed that a palm frond was hanging from a power line in the yard.
Apparently wanting to keep everything tidy, he decided to pull the frond
down with the tool he had at hand -- the metal pole.
Not surprisingly, Kincannon was electrocuted.
"Hindsight, of course, is a marvelous thing," attorney Aitken says,
with no sense of irony. He notes the victim "was only being a good
citizen in trying to get rid of this palm frond," as if it was bothering
anyone but Kincannon.
Naturally, like most electric utilities, Southern California Edison
runs what they call an "aggressive" ongoing publicity campaign to tell
people not to try to get things out of power lines by themselves, urging
them to call the company for help instead.
"It's tragic what happened to Mr. Kincannon," says SCE spokesman Tom
Boyd. But, he adds, considering the company has worked hard to keep
people from getting anywhere near the power lines, "we're a little
surprised that we might be served with a lawsuit."
Lawsuit? Heck yeah -- we can't have an untimely death go without
someone to blame, can we? Thus Kincannon's widow, Francilene, has sued
Edison in Orange County Superior Court. The suit also names Leslie's
Swimming Pool Supplies, because the skimmer pole didn't have a warning
label on it to tell people that it's not smart to stick metal poles into
overhead power lines. "There's a great deal of information not available
to homeowners like Kincannon," Aitken claims. Uh huh.
Edison has devoted more than reasonable resources to warn its
customers about dangers that should be obvious to all, let alone a
highly educated person. And what silliness for her to claim yet another
warning label in an already overcrowded sea of caution notices would have
helped when common sense didn't. Sure, it's sad that Mrs. Kincannon must
continue on without her husband's lucrative salary, but blaming others
for the foolish choices Kincannon freely made on his own is a ridiculous
abuse of the system. There's only one other person who could possibly be
to blame here, but Charles Darwin is exempt from court actions.
SOURCES:
1) "Death Suit Names Utility", Los Angeles Times, 19 August
2003
http://StellaAwards.com/cgi-bin/redirect3.pl?38a
Ya know, it's stories like this that remind me that an advanced degree in anything, be it law, medicine, engineering or anything else for that matter is NOT indicative of possessing common sense. Also, some people's vanity and/or obsessive-compulsive nature supercede any thought processes which would extend the quality or length of one's life. The other things in this article that amuse me are the fact that the widow is dumbass enough to try and file a lawsuit on this one. Her husband should have been smart enough to know that playing with power lines WITH A METAL POLE could be slightly hazardous to his health, if not out-and-out lethal. Also, the fact that the widow's parents named her "Francilene." What the hell were they thinking?!
EOR