The Boiler in a Chefornak Home Started Whistling. When He Went to Look, It Exploded. The Housing Authority That Promised to Inspect It Said Its Contract Had Expired Years Earlier, and Lost.

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.