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Is an owner of a dog that mauls someone responsible for damages to the victim?

• GaryBluto 8mo ago
  Do companies own their workers?
  • buellerbueller 8mo ago
    There are jobs where anything the employee does on company time is owned by the company.
  • Edman274 8mo ago
    The companies themselves certainly think they do when they give tasks for their workers by dictating the duration, manner, and other terms of employment. Why should they be able to have it both ways? No risk, all reward?
  • quickthrowman 8mo ago
    If one of my electricians accidentally bangs a sprinkler head and thousands of gallons of water dump into the building, my company is responsible for any damages. Obviously we’re insured against these risks, but we’re liable. There’s almost always a contract that spells it out, but in the situation where there is no explicit contract, I’d expect that we’re still liable. My electricians are W2 employees and not contractors, and it’s possible that construction has different laws regarding liability than a ride share company that uses contractors, so they’re not equivalent, and I am not a lawyer.
    • rented_mule 8mo ago
      Oh wow, what a bad memory. This exact thing happened in a building I lived in several years ago, a couple of floors above me. It looked like waterfalls outside our windows and water was rushing in under the baseboards. All while every fire alarm in the building was going off and fire truck sirens were blaring outside. Understandably, the fire department would not turn off the water until they had been to every floor to check for fire. On the upside, it's impressive how much water can be delivered by fire sprinklers. Closer to the topic, the building's management company tried to come after me (a renter) for the expense of the restoration people who were brought in to rip out my drywall and carpet so mold wouldn't form. Maybe they figured tenants were an easier target than the contractor's insurance? Oh, and the management company were the ones who selected and hired the contractors. I had to get very aggressive, with plenty of threats of legal action, to get them to back down. That was fairly easy to do as my state's laws specifically specify liability rules for flooding in multi-tenant buildings. They never did do repairs while I was there - I moved out when my lease expired nearly a year later as they were tying to raise the rent, with drywall still missing.
      • quickthrowman 8mo ago
        Oh man, multi-tenant housing sounds like the worst case scenario for this sort of thing. I’m glad you were able to avoid any liability, trying to pin liability for rebuilding a unit on a tenant is insane. And yeah, the volume of water a fire pump can move is astounding. Electrical code requires the fire pump to be wired so that it can run at its locked rotor amp rating without tripping overcurrent protection and it’s usually tapped directly off the utility transformer separately from the rest of the electrical service. There’s also a smaller jockey pump that maintains water pressure in the system so that when the main pump turns on, there’s no lag with water coming out. The pump motor will keep spinning even if there’s a dead short if it’s fused right above locked rotor amps, since replacing a motor is cheaper than replacing a fully burned out structure and keeping the water flowing allows as many people to escape as possible. The feeder has to be encased in concrete or it has to be fire-resistant cable.
• kingstnap 8mo ago
  Extremely strange analogy. Uber drivers aren't per dogs. They are adult humans you can make them liable for shit they do.
  • buellerbueller 8mo ago
    You can make both liable, too.
• hackingonempty 8mo ago
  It probably depends on the state but in California, yes. Dog owners there are strictly liable for any injuries caused by their dogs unless the victim was trespassing.
  • buellerbueller 8mo ago
    Yes, that was my point; it was a rhetorical question.