The Rouge River, in the Province of Quebec, is floatable but not navigable, and is used by lumbermen for bringing down sawlogs to booms in which the logs are collected at the mouth of the river and distributed among the owners.
The plaintiff constructed a municipal bridge across the river near its mouth where the collecting booms are situated.
The defendant and a number of other lumbermen engaged in driving their logs, mixed together, down the river, did not place men at the bridge to protect it during the drive and took no precautions to prevent the formation of jams of their logs at the piers of a railway bridge which crosses the river a short distance below the *municipal bridge, nor did they break up a jam of logs which formed there, but they abandoned the drive before the logs had been safely boomed at the river mouth. The River Rouge is subject to sudden freshets during heavy rains, and, on the occurrence of one of these freshets, the waters were penned back by the jam and a quantity of the logs were swept up stream with such force that the superstructure of the municipal bridge was carried away.
In an action by the municipality to recover damages from the lumbermen, jointly and severally,
Held, affirming the judgment appealed from, the Chief Justice and Sedgewick J. dissenting, that, irrespectively of any duty imposed by statute, the proprietors of the logs were liable for actionable negligence on account of the careless manner in which the driving of the logs was carried on, and were jointly and severally responsible in damages for the injuries so caused.
:-Sir Henry Strong C.J. and Sedgewick, Girouard, Davies and Mills JJ.