iIn Westover v. Jersey Central Power & Light Co., 2012 WL 1722582 (N.J.Super.A.D. May 17, 2012), plaintiff’s barn was destroyed by fire. Plaintiff alleged electrical service conductors owned and maintained by defendant power company caused the fire. The court excluded plaintiff’s origin and cause expert, finding that his reports contained critical omissions and inadmissible “net opinions.”
Further, his failure to exclude other possible causes of the fire was fatal to his opinions and to plaintiff’s strict liability claim. “Nowhere in [the expert’s] reports are there any detailed technical or scientific explanations of how the short circuit occurred. [He] merely proffers that the fire was caused by an ‘electrical short circuit’. . . [T]he reports neglect to provide the requisite ‘whys and wherefores’ that our jurisprudence requires from an expert’s opinion.”
