$2.5 Million Injury Settlement - Defective Product Burn Accident (Inadequate Warning)
Raleigh Fire and Burn Accident Settlement Result
In 2022, we represented an 49-year-old client who suffered catastrophic burn injuries when a cleaning product caught fire and exploded in the commercial kitchen where he was working. It was a complex case that involved defective products claims as well as premises liability claims. Our team of defective products attorneys in Raleigh reached a confidential settlement with the product manufacturer, the product distributor, and the owner of the commercial kitchen for $2,500,000.00.
Our client was an HVAC and refrigeration technician. He was dispatched to a commercial kitchen in August 2018 to service an under-the-counter refrigerator that was no longer cooling. When he arrived, the kitchen was dirty and in poor condition. Our client determined that the refrigerator wasn’t working because its coils were completely covered in cooking grease. As a result, our client used a commercial cleaning product to degrease the coils, spraying the product liberally as the label instructed. Moments later, a fireball exploded in the area where our client was working, tragically causing life-changing 2nd and 3rd degree burns to our client’s face and arms and damaging his right arm. Our client was hospitalized for two months following the incident and will be permanently scarred for the rest of his life. And he is no longer able to work as a HVAC technician.
The cleaning product did not contain a warning regarding the product’s flammability or any risks associated with using the product in the vicinity of open flames. As part of the investigation into this accident, our Raleigh personal injury team, led by Justin Osborn and Matthew Gambale, discovered that the product manufacturer knew the product was flammable and specifically cautioned against using the production near ignition sources. However, those warnings were hidden in a material safety data sheet that wasn’t available to regular users of the product. We engaged a product labeling and safety expert witness who opined that the product’s label was inadequate and unreasonably failed to warn of the product’s dangerousness. To support our theory, our team also discovered nearly a dozen competing cleaning products manufactured by competitors with similar formulas that contained a flammability warning.
Our client sprayed the cleaning product a few feet away from commercial gas fryer, which our experts concluded was the ignition source that caused the explosion. During our investigation, we obtained a copy of the gas fryer operations manual, which included a number of clear and specific warnings regarding the use of aerosols near the fryer as well as requirements that the fryers’ owner/operator post visible warnings near the fryer about the use of aerosols near it. The owner of the commercial kitchen failed to post those warnings and claimed to have never seen the fryer operations manual. The commercial kitchen had received numerous violations from food inspectors for its poor conditions, which we argued also contributed to the accident.
The defendants raised the issue of contributory negligence , which is a common defense in North Carolina. Specifically, they argued that spraying an aerosol in a commercial kitchen is a known hazard and blamed our client for his own injuries. However, we argued that our client was not aware of any ignition sources or open flames because the commercial kitchen owner failed to post the proper warnings.
This is just an example of one of the recent results by defective products lawyers in Raleigh, NC. With decades of collective experience, our injury attorneys have helped clients across North Carolina and South Carolina recover millions in damages against insurance companies, large corporations, employers, and the powerful.
Learn more about fire and burn injury claims in North Carolina.