Plastic Chair Failure
Posted by John Sedgewick - 01/05/10 at 10:05 pmMolded plastic chairs sell for low prices for a reason: they are not very durable. The points of highest stress, and thus the points of most frequent failure, are where the legs meet the seat and where the back or arms meet the seat.
Lawyers and forensic engineers get involved in analyzing plastic chair failure when the failure causes people to fall and get seriously hurt.
In all such cases, the first step is to preserve the broken parts and protect the fracture surfaces from further damage. That includes avoiding any effort to push or touch the fracture surfaces together in an informal effort to “reconstruct” what happened. Touching fracture surfaces in any way can destroy evidence, and such informal reconstruction does not advance the case in any way. If you observe or are involved in an incident in which components break off a molded plastic chair, wrap each piece separately as soon as possible to protect it from physical harm, exposure to chemicals, and other damaging events.
In thinking about whether personal injury damages may be available to an injured person in connection with chair failure, it is important to consider how the chair was used. If a very cheap chair is sold for use in an industrial or commercial setting, such as in a restaurant, hotel, conference center, or school, the legal cause of the failure may be the choice of a low budget product rather than a defect in the chair itself. It is patently unreasonable to assume that the cheapest form of molded plastic chair will stand up to frequent and heavy use. In such a case, a successful claim may be brought against those who sold or selected the inexpensive, lightweight chair when they knew it was likely to get heavy use.
If the chair was properly selected for the setting in which it was used but still fails in a way that causes injury, the failure may be the result of unforeseeable misuse, such as damage during shipping or being thrown out the window of a college dorm, or factory failure such as the use of contaminated raw materials or poor controls in the molding and inspection process. Testing failed plastic materials is very expensive, and if you think about using scientific methods to determine what caused the failure, it is easy to see why preserving and protecting the broken parts is so important. Testing the purity and consistency of plastic is done by running numerous tests on multiple samples of a specified size and shape. One must have enough sample material to test, and you will want to be sure that the samples being tested came from either the exact chair involved in the injury or one purchased from the same source in the same lot.
One place to look for evidence that plastic chair failure was caused by defects in materials or workmanship is to ask about other similar incidents. The wholesale supplier of the chair and the owner or the failed chair (particularly institutional users who may have purchased hundreds of similar chairs in one or more shipments to furnish classrooms or dormitories) may have knowledge of frequent or regular similar failures. Such evidence is very important in showing both foreseeability and causation: the injury was not an isolated unavoidable accident, but one of a pattern of similar failures. When there is evidence of widespread failure, defendants are anxious to make it available to the plaintiff in order to pass blame up the chain from owner to wholesaler to manufacturer. It is almost always good for injured people to have defendants fighting among themselves.
One way to protect oneself from the failure of inexpensive plastic chairs is to avoid buying or using them. As noted above, they are cheap for a reason. If you must use a cheap molded chair, inspect it before you sit down. If it is cracked or flimsy, refuse to use it. If you are sitting in such a chair and hear a crack or feel that it is just too wobbly, stand up carefully and find a different and better place for you and your family and friends to sit. Protecting yourself is always the best option.
If you or a friend is injured by a chair that fails, get the best medical treatment available to you, gather and protect all of the failed parts, and call a lawyer with experience in similar cases. An experienced product liability lawyer may be able to prove the case with a minimum of expensive scientific testing and engineering analysis, which is a good way to improve the bottom line outcome of the plaintiff’s case.
