In King v. Pierce Manufacturing, Inc., 2014 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 122078 (D. Mass. Sep. 2, 2014), a woman was fatally injured in 2010 when, while walking down the street, she was struck by the nozzle of a hose that had come loose from a passing fire truck. The truck was built by defendant in 2002 to the specifications of the local fire department, which included hose compartments with covers to secure the hoses but not redundant hose restraints offered by defendant to provide extra security for the hoses. When the truck was built, the National Fire Protection Association ("NFPA")'s governing standard neither required nor recommended redundant restraints. In 2005, however, the standard was amended, in response to a proposal by defendant's representative to the standard-developing committee, to require such restraints— but not any recall or retrofit of older trucks—following an incident involving another company's truck in which a young girl was killed by a dislodged hose. Decedent's death was the first accident of its kind that defendant's trucks had ever experienced. Following the accident, the fire department purchased redundant restraints in the form of netting from defendant for all the department's trucks, at a cost of $524 each.

The administrator of decedent's estate sued the truck manufacturer in the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts for negligence, breach of the implied warranty of merchantability (the Massachusetts near-equivalent of strict liability) and wrongful death, alleging the truck was defectively designed because it was not equipped with a redundant hose restraint that would have prevented the hose from coming loose. The manufacturer moved for summary judgment on the ground that plaintiff had not offered any expert testimony regarding the alleged defectiveness of the truck's design or causation.

The court first noted that "in a products liability case of any sophistication, a plaintiff's failure to support her claims of a design defect with expert testimony is almost always fatal." The only exceptions are where the unreasonableness of the dangers presented by the product's design are matters of common knowledge and understanding. Defendant offered the expert testimony of a mechanical engineer who had inspected the truck and opined that it was not defective or unreasonably dangerous, and that the accident was caused by the fire department's failure properly to stow the hose in the hose compartments. Plaintiff offered no expert testimony in rebuttal, arguing instead that "common sense is all that is required to determine whether the fire truck should have had [redundant] hose restraints." The court disagreed, holding that without the aid of expert testimony the average juror would not be capable of making rational decisions about fire truck design, the history and applicability of fire apparatus design standards, appropriate accessories, risk and utility analyses, the relative safety of available alternative designs and accident causation, and would instead be forced to make such determinations based on speculation and conjecture.

Moreover, apart from the absence of expert testimony, plaintiff's "common sense" argument failed due to the lack of reasonable foreseeability of plaintiff's injury and the intervening cause represented by the fire department's failure properly to stow the hose. Not only was there an absence of prior similar accidents or applicable safety standards requiring redundant hose restraints in 2002 that would have put defendant on notice of the risks attendant to its design, but there also was no evidence that the fire department, if notified of the risk, would in fact have purchased such restraints for its trucks at the time. In addition, plaintiff did not offer any evidence to rebut the defendant's expert's conclusion that the accident was caused by the department's improper storage of the hose rather than any lack of restraints. Accordingly, the court granted defendant's motion and entered judgment against plaintiff on all claims.

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