How Are Mechanical Failure Cases Different From Other Accident Cases?

It’s fairly often that we’ll see malfunctions of equipment, and malfunctions of equipment can occur from a variety of different things. One of the things that we’ve seen as the world has become a smaller place, we have seen more and more foreign countries as the source for the manufacture of products that are being used in America. So we had a case, chemical plant here, some time back, that involved a wire string that was manufactured in India. And so you will see things like that, that are manufactured overseas, some of them are manufactured in a very good fashion, some of them are not. So you would hire say a metallurgist to show what was malfunctioning in terms of the metals as they were manufacturing, and that can cause equipment to malfunction if the metals are not right. You can also see malfunctions are not from defects, what we would call defects in the product, but you can also see malfunctions in equipment from poor maintenance that occurred, things that are not followed up on. There’s a case right now that we’ve been retained in that we’re looking at in another state, and in that situation, you had a tank that became overpressurized and exploded and killed two people, and we represent the families of one of those men that died. And in that situation, we don’t yet know what it is that malfunctioned, but clearly something did not work properly, OK? It’s possible that the tank did not function as it should have, that the pressures in there were the pressures to be expected, but the tank didn’t withstand those pressures, or it could be that the pressures exceeded the pressures it was supposed to. And if that’s the case, it was other equipment that malfunctioned, it would have been pressure relief valves or safety relief valves that didn’t let off the excess pressure in time to prevent the rupture of the tank. Whenever you have a mechanical failure of equipment, you’ve got the exact same remedies that you would have in other cases. You can still sue for lost income, lost wages, you can still sue for disfigurement, impairment, death, you can sue for all of those things, but the focus of the case is of course, different at that point. You’re looking at why did the equipment fail? Was it a failure of maintenance? Was it a failure of design? Was it a failure in the manufacturing of that product? Was it a failure of somehow in the warnings associated with how that product was to be used? That’s how that would differ from other cases.