$2.85 Million Verdict for a Man Injured in a Chefornak Boiler Explosion, Against the Housing Authority
After trial: Reduced by statute, then affirmed. The $3,427,000 verdict (September 2019) was cut to $2,847,000 under the AS 09.17.010 noneconomic cap, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed on April 15, 2022 (507 P.3d 963).
Won by Angstman Law Office, Inc., Reeves Amodio LLC and Winner & Associates, P.C..
In January 2016 Dietrich Mael heard the boiler in his family's Chefornak home whistling and went to check it. It exploded, threw him against a wall, sprayed him with scalding water and glycol and knocked him out. The home's owner, the AVCP Regional Housing Authority, had promised in the family's lease-purchase contract to inspect the boiler and had not; the pressure relief valve was rusted through. A Bethel jury put all the fault on the authority and awarded $3,427,000. Alaska's cap cut the noneconomic portion to $1,000,000, and the Alaska Supreme Court affirmed $2,847,000 in 2022.
What happened
Thomas and Rose Mael had lived in their Chefornak home for 25 years under a lease-purchase contract with the Association of Village Council Presidents Regional Housing Authority. The contract included a promise that the authority would inspect the boiler.
In January 2016 Rose Mael heard the boiler whistling and asked her adult son Dietrich to check it. As he approached, it exploded. He was thrown against a wall, sprayed with scalding water and glycol, and knocked unconscious. He spent about a week in hospital, then months of physical therapy. The back pain that remained ended his employment and the subsistence hunting and fishing that fed his family. The pressure relief valve on the boiler was rusted and corroded.
The housing authority's defense was that its inspection contract had expired in 2009. The courts did not accept it: the authority had never conveyed title to the family and was still collecting a monthly administrative fee from them, so its duty to inspect with reasonable care had never ended.
The case was tried to a jury in Bethel beginning in September 2019. The jury found the authority 100 percent at fault and awarded Dietrich Mael $1,672,000 in economic damages and $1,580,000 in noneconomic damages, plus $175,000 to his parents and his two minor children for negligent infliction of emotional distress, a total of $3,427,000. The children are identified in the case only by initials and are not named here.
Then the cap. AS 09.17.010 limits noneconomic damages, and for a severe permanent physical impairment the ceiling is the greater of $1,000,000 or $25,000 times the injured person's life expectancy. The superior court cut Dietrich's $1,580,000 to $1,000,000. The authority appealed on liability and argued that the family members' emotional-distress awards had to be squeezed under the same single cap; the family cross-appealed. On April 15, 2022 the Alaska Supreme Court, in Nos. S-17802 and S-17821, affirmed on both counts: the duty to inspect survived the contract's technical expiration, and each family member's emotional-distress injury was distinct enough to carry its own cap. That left $2,847,000 in damages. With prejudgment interest, costs and attorney's fees the amount the authority was ordered to pay came to more than $3.5 million.
Susan Orlansky of Reeves Amodio, Russell L. Winner of Winner & Associates and Myron Angstman of Angstman Law Office in Bethel represented the Maels. Aaron D. Sperbeck and Shane C. Coffey of Birch Horton Bittner & Cherot, with Thomas Weathers, represented the authority.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Angstman Law Office, Inc.
All Angstman Law Office, Inc. proven verdicts →In August 2015 Nicholas Tucker, a 37-year-old commercial fisherman from Ketchikan serving a sentence at Spring Creek Correctional Center in Seward, developed a spinal cord infection. Over six days of written medical requests, a wheelchair trip to the clinic and notes recording severe radiating pain, staff gave him ibuprofen and a muscle relaxant. Other prisoners were moving him to the toilet and writing his requests for him by the time a nurse found he could not get out of his bunk. He was flown to Anchorage for emergency surgery and is permanently partially paralyzed. The State of Alaska settled in June 2019 for $1,800,000 plus $200,000 in Medicaid liens.
Related premises liability verdicts
Anapol Weiss shareholder Kristen Gibbons Feden helped secure $1.6 billion in default verdicts for 104 women sexually abused as children by former Long Island pediatrician Stuart Copperman, one of the largest cumulative civil awards against a single individual in U.S. history.
A Dallas jury awarded $1.1 billion against a trust fund heir who beat a 2-year-old into a permanent vegetative state in 2021, a verdict the firm calls the largest child-assault award in U.S. history.
A Clayton County jury awarded $1 billion to a woman who was raped at age 14 by an armed security guard her employer hired without verifying he was licensed to carry a weapon.
Joseph Bruno and Bruno & Bruno served as lead plaintiffs' counsel in a landmark class action brought by more than 8,000 Gentilly residents exposed to a butadiene tank-car fire in 1987, securing a jury verdict that included $2.5 billion in punitive damages against CSX Transportation alone, later reduced to $850 million on appeal and affirmed by Louisiana's Fourth Circuit.