The jury in the first of two wrongful death lawsuits brought against E-One, E-One dealer Hall Mark Fire Apparatus, and the Kilgore Fire Department has concluded that the defendants were jointly responsible for the 2009 deaths of Kyle Perkins and Cory Galloway.
Perkins and Galloway were killed while training on January 25, 2009 with a 95 foot ladder tower on an 8 story building. The men were in the ladder’s bucket but were not wearing safety belts at the time. The platform became stuck against the roof of the building, and whiplashed violently when it broke free catapulting both men to their deaths.
The families sued E-One and Hall Mark on a products liability – defective design theory, as well as negligence, and gross negligence. The Kilgore Fire Department was also accused of negligence in allowing Perkins and Galloway to be in the bucket without safety harnesses, and without all personnel being properly trained on the truck.
The case decided yesterday was brought by the family of Kyle Perkins. The jury heard testimony over eight days, and deliberated for only four hours before awarding $800,000 in damages.
The second suit, brought on behalf of Cory Galloway, is scheduled for trial in June.
It would be interesting to see if E-one has a policy in place regarding safety procedures for its sales people. Or since the truck has been delivered, does it fall under the receiving fire department? Is this the first tower to be placed in service and there are no SOGs for bucket operations.
My issue is having a sales person dictating the training. Yes they have knowledge of the rig but the department should dictate safety during all training sessions.
If you don’t wear your seatbelt and you get into a accident. Can you hold the sales person and the auto manufacture liable? Go easy on me Curt just asking….
Jason
I’ll go easy and its a good question. First of all keep in mind that the role of the training provided by E-One’s instructors was only one aspect of the products liability case. My understanding is there was also a question on the design of the doors to the bucket – (whether they latched properly, swung the right way) and some other design questions on the platform and operational controls.
Products liability has become a truly specialized area of the law – which I am not an expert in. There are strict liability theories, breach of contract/warranty theories and negligence theories – and the failure of the E-One instructors to have/follow their own policies may be an issue under one theory and not under another.
That being said – having a company instructor demonstrate how to use a piece of equipment in an unsafe manner could make it very difficult for the company to avoid liability when an end user doing the same thing as the instructor, get’s killed in the process. The argument can be made that when the instructors demonstrated operating the device without a safety harness, it constituted a “warranty” that it was safe to operate the device without a safety harness. The argument can also be made that its constituted negligence… and on and on. The jury only needs to find the company liable on one of the multiple theories to award damages.
It would be the same for an auto dealer who’s salesman took you for a test drive and told you it was safe to drive a particular model car without seat belts… the same for the manufacturer who produces a TV commercial that said it was safe to drive the car without seatbelts… Representations like that can become part of the “basis of the bargain”… and thus a warranty. Lawyers usually try to limit those kinds of warranties by inserting fancy small print language in contracts – but you know how that goes…
So to answer your question – the manufacturer tells the fire department and end users how the device can safely be operated, and the department then sets its own policy for the device’s use – but both can be held responsible in a case like this where certain mandatory safety practices that should be (1) made clear and (2) followed are neither.
Well stated thank you