Canon Copiers Are HOT!!

Did The Canon Copier Cause The Fire?

The fire started in a locked storeroom. It destroyed the video rental store in a St. Paul strip mall and damaged three adjacent buildings. An employee of the video rental store had set the Canon copier (located in the storeroom and serviced one week prior to the fire) to make 80 copies before leaving the storeroom while the copying was in progress. Several hours later, the security alarms activated, the fire in the storeroom was discovered, and the store was destroyed before the fire could be extinguished. The Canon copier was identified as the probable source of the fire and plaintiffs sued Canon on product liability theories of negligent design, manufacturing, and testing, and breach of warranty. Fireman’s Fund Ins. Co. et al. v. Canon USA, January 12, 2005 (8th Cir. 2005).

Plaintiffs hired several experts to determine the cause of the fire. Plaintiffs’ experts produced reports concluding that the copier’s internal burn patterns showed that the upper heating assembly of the copier caused the fire. According to their reports, the heating assembly was defective because a component thermal fuse safety device was not properly rated to prevent such a fire. Canon’s expert challenged the plaintiffs’ theory of the heating assembly as the cause of the fire and, in rebuttal, Plaintiffs’ experts proposed instead that the copier’s composite power supply board was the cause of the fire. Plaintiffs then unsuccessfully tried to re-open discovery to obtain information necessary to support their composite power board theory. Canon successfully moved for summary judgment on the grounds that Plaintiffs’ experts’ opinions were unreliable and potentially confusing to the jury. Plaintiffs appealed.

According to the federal appellate court, and citing federal rule of evidence 702, the opinion of a qualified expert witness is admissible only “if (1) it is based upon sufficient facts or data, (2) it is the product of reliable principles and methods, and (3) the expert has applied the principles and methods reliably to the facts of the case.” The court agreed with Canon that Plaintiffs’ experts failed to follow the fire investigation standards found in National Fire Protection Association’s publication NFPA 921: Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations.3 NFPA 921 requires investigators carefully examine fire scene data and conduct appropriate testing. Plaintiffs’ experts failed to do either in this case to support their theory that a thermal fuse, designed to cut off the electrical current to the heating element when the temperature got too high, malfunctioned. The experts’ experimental testing failed to produce a flame or re-create a failing thermal fuse. Additional doubt was cast upon the experts’ conclusions when examination of the thermal fuse in the burned copier revealed the heating element was not the fire’s source. Neither expert addressed this evidence which was contrary to their opinions regarding causation.

Moreover, the court found that Plaintiffs’ experts’ alternate composite power supply board theory “seriously undermined” the reliability of their opinions because the experts used the same burn pattern evidence to support two different theories of where the fire started inside the copier. The reliability of the new theory was further eroded because neither expert identified a specific defect in the power supply board that may have caused the fire. Furthermore, neither investigator carefully weighed his second theory against the fire scene evidence nor conducted appropriate testing as required in NFPA 921. According to the court:

In summary, neither [expert] proposed a specific defect on the composite power supply board that might have caused the fire. Furthermore, neither expert carefully examined this hypothesis of fire origin against empirical data obtained from fire scene analysis and appropriate testing, as required by NFPA 921. . . . Because the experts did not apply the principles and methods of NFPA 921 reliably to the facts of the case, . . . it was not error to exclude these experts opinions.

Because the underlying opinions were unreliable and excluded, the plaintiffs product defect theories against Canon collapsed. Without expert opinions on fire causation there was no case against Canon and the lawsuit was dismissed.

3The court would presumably have admitted the expert opinions had the plaintiffs’ experts followed NFPA 921 because this fire investigation guide qualified as a reliable resource endorsed by a professional organization.

Whoa, thats alotta mumbo jumbo to me!

Just to be clear, we are talking about copiers that were last manufactured in 1997.

You are correct~