New England Foundation Company, Incorporated v. Commonwealth, 327 Mass. 587

Summary

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that a contract for pile installation did not impose an absolute guarantee that every pile would support a twenty-ton load. Read together with the specified pile-driving formula, the contract required compliance with the formula unless and until the engineers modified it based on load tests. The court therefore ordered judgment for the contractor for the cost of additional piles required under an extra work order, with a dissent arguing that the contractor had failed to satisfy the contract's twenty-ton load requirement.

Holdings

1. The requirement that the piles have a safe working load capacity of twenty tons, read together with the formula clause, was not an absolute undertaking that every pile would achieve that result by actual load testing. The formula was the contractual method for determining compliance unless and until the engineers modified the required value of S on the basis of load tests.
2. Because the petitioner drove the piles in accordance with the contract's original formula and the engineers never modified that formula before the work was performed, the Commonwealth was not entitled to treat the additional pile work as the petitioner's obligation under the original contract.

Questions Presented

1. Whether the contract's requirement that all piles have a safe working load capacity of twenty tons constituted an absolute guarantee independent of the formula for determining pile value.
2. Whether piles driven in compliance with the contract's original formula satisfied the contract until the engineers modified the formula on the basis of load tests.
3. Whether the Commonwealth was entitled to deduct the cost of additional piles on the ground that the original piles failed to comply with the contract.

Disposition

reversed