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36. In North West Water Ltd. v. Binnie & Partners (1990) 3 All ER 547) the principle of estoppel and res judicata were considered by the Queen's Bench Division. That was a case where the Water Authority commissioned a firm of consultant engineers to design and supervise the construction by contractors of an underground tunnel link and valve house to take water from one river to another. The scheme prompted protests from local residents which caused the plaintiff to arrange a meeting of the local residents at the valve house in order to demonstrate the operation of the scheme. During the meeting an explosion occurred because unknown to anyone the valve house had filled with methane gas which ignited. Some people were killed and the rest injured. The Victims brought action claiming damages for injury or death against the Water Authority, the contractors who constructed the system and the consultant engineers. In the trial the Judge held that all three defendants were to blame and apportioned liability between them. All of them appealed to the court of appeal which allowed the appeal of the Water Authority and contractors and held that the consultant engineers were wholly to blame. In a separate proceedings the water authority issued proceedings against the consultant engineers seeking to recover damages to the tunnel system caused by the explosion. The water authority contended that the damage had been caused by the consultant engineers' negligence and further alleged that as between the water authority and the consultant engineers the issue of negligence had been decided in the first action and was res judicata and that the consultant engineers' defence denying negligence was an an abuse of process and should be struck out. The question was whether the consultant engineers were estopped from denying negligence and whether their defence should be struck out. It was held that where an issue had for all practical purposes been decided in a court of competent jurisdiction the court would not allow that issue to be raised in separate proceedings between different parties arising out of identical facts and dependent on the same evidence since not only was the party seeking to relitigate the issue prevented from doing so by issue estoppel but it would also be an abuse of process to allow the issue to be relitigated.