## Facts

- An alarm system serving Arett Sales Corporation’s premises malfunctioned or was negligently handled, causing a false fire alarm to be transmitted to the Waterbury Fire Department.
- Waterbury firefighters responded to the alarm in a city fire engine.
- En route, the fire engine’s brakes failed and the engine struck a tree.
- The brake failure was caused by the City of Waterbury’s negligent maintenance of the fire engine.
- Two firefighters died and two were seriously injured; spouses asserted derivative claims.
- Plaintiffs sued the alarm-related defendants and Arett for negligence, alleging the false alarm proximately caused the injuries.
- A jury returned a verdict for plaintiffs exceeding $4.4 million.

## Issues

1. Whether defendants who negligently caused a false fire alarm owed a duty (as limited by proximate cause/scope of risk) to firefighters injured when a responding fire engine crashed due to brake failure caused by the city’s negligent maintenance.
2. Whether injuries from brake failure were within the reasonably foreseeable risks created by transmitting a false fire alarm.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court of Connecticut reversed the trial court’s judgment for plaintiffs.
- The court held defendants were not liable because the fire engine’s brake failure, stemming from independent municipal negligence, was beyond the reasonably foreseeable risks created by transmitting a false alarm.
- The court concluded that imposing liability for harm defendants could not reasonably anticipate and could not control would serve no legitimate objective of negligence law.
- One justice dissented, reasoning that injuries from a responding fire engine’s travel were broadly foreseeable once an alarm (even false) triggered an emergency response.

## Legal Principles

- Negligence liability is limited to harms that fall within the reasonably foreseeable scope of the risk that made the defendant’s conduct negligent (often expressed as proximate cause or the legal scope of duty).
- Even if causation-in-fact exists, courts may cut off liability on foreseeability and policy grounds when the injury is too remote from the defendant’s conduct.
- A defendant is generally not liable for injuries primarily caused by the independent negligence of another actor when that intervening negligence produces a type of harm outside the original actor’s foreseeable risk.
- Causing the transmission of a false fire alarm does not, without more, extend liability to injuries caused by catastrophic brake failure of a negligently maintained municipal fire engine responding to the alarm.

## Conclusion

The court held that the negligent transmission of a false fire alarm did not make the alarm-related defendants and premises owner legally responsible for firefighters’ deaths and injuries caused by an independently negligently maintained fire engine’s brake failure, because that harm fell outside the foreseeable scope of risk and liability would be too remote as a matter of policy.


Lodge v. Arett Sales Corp., 246 Conn. 563 (1998)