INDIANAPOLIS (Legal Newsline) - A woman who sued the manufacturer of brake-cleaning fluid over the death of her husband after he was killed trying to cut into a 55-gallon drum of the stuff with a welding torch has no case, an Indiana appeals court ruled.
The woman’s claims fail in the face of explicit warnings on the top of the drum stating “FLAMMABLE LIQUID” and “Do not flame cut, braze or weld empty container,” the Indiana Court of Appeals found, reversing a trial judge’s refusal to dismiss the case.
John Fritchley II was killed in February 2018 after he bought a drum that once contained highly flammable S-1693 and brought it home to try to cut off the top. The drum exploded, killing him. His wife sued Superior Solvents and Chemicals, claiming the accident occurred because the drum was somehow defective.
Superior moved to dismiss, citing three defenses under Indiana law: That the accident occurred because of misuse of the product, that the product had been altered and that Fritchley’s own actions caused his death. Vanderburgh Circuit Court Judge David Kiely denied all three arguments and Superior appealed.
In an April 12 decision the appeals court reversed, ruling two of the three defenses were valid and sufficient to dismiss the case. First, the label explicitly warned Fritchley the drum was dangerous even if empty and he had enough training to know it, the court ruled. During a 17-year career at Alcoa Fritchley attended a number of training presentations on fire prevention and hazard communications including instruction on specific chemicals that could be explosive and how workers must be careful using welding torches around them.
Given his training, his use of a welding torch to open the drum “would have been particularly unforeseeable” for Superior to anticipate, the court noted. While some cases have focused on whether there were enough warnings, the court went on, the number didn’t matter here.
“Even though John ignored essentially only one warning, we have little trouble concluding that the nature of that warning was prominent and emphatic enough that Superior could not reasonably have expected any person to ignore it,” the court concluded.