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Article Excerpt
Charlie Schoggins completed his week s work as a carpenter at a home construction site in central Oregon and went into town with his wages and two companions for an afternoon and evening of eating and drinking. When he returned to the work site, intoxicated, Charlie asked another worker, who was leaving the area, if he could spend the night in his tent and use his Coleman Focus 15 propane radiant heater. The heater had a warning on it stating, "WARNING: FOR OUTDOOR USE ONLY. Never use inside house, camper, tent, vehicle or other unventilated or enclosed areas."
As the coworker gave Charlie the heater, he said in a joking manner, "Don't die in my tent." After another worker used the heater for about an hour to warm his tent, Charlie took the Focus 15 heater into his tent and went to sleep. He was found dead in the morning from carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning.
This may sound like a difficult products liability case, but such cases are winnable. After eight days of trial and less than three hours of jury deliberation, an Oregon jury found the heater manufacturer--the Coleman Co.--negligent and strictly liable with no contributory fault attributed to Charlie. An Oregon appellate court upheld the wrongful death verdict. (1)
Since the 1970s, several companies have manufactured and sold propane radiant camping heaters. There are two types: bulk mount models that attach to 20-pound propane cylinders (as used with barbeque grills), and smaller models that use disposable 16.4-ounce propane bottles.
The heaters are not expensive--selling for around $40--and are prominently displayed and sold in camping stores. To an uninformed camping public, they look like the ideal solution for heating a tent, camper, or hunting or ice-fishing shack. For the most part, the heaters carry no warning that users could die from carbon monoxide poisoning if the heaters were used in an enclosed area.
Coleman heaters
Most propane heater litigation has been against Coleman. (2) The company entered the market in the mid-1980s, when other manufacturers were already producing similar products. For reasons discussed later, the heaters made by other manufacturers have not had a large number of CO incidents. But Coleman, which sells more camping products than other manufacturers, has become, by a large margin, the industry leader in CO deaths.
The company's Focus heaters had numerical designations indicating their maximum heat output. For instance, the Focus 5 produced a maximum of 5,000 British thermal units (Btu) of heat, and the Focus 15 produced a maximum of 15,000 Btu. The lowest Btu models--the Focus 3, 5, and 10--used disposable 16.4-ounce propane bottles. Larger models--the Focus 12 (sold only in Canada), 15, and 30--were bulk-mount heaters.
Even though Coleman sold the Focus 15 and 30 as camping heaters, the company maintained they were "outdoor heaters" and not to be taken into tents and campers. This presents an interesting question: Why does a camper need a heater only to heat the great outdoors? A campfire does that. A camper needs a heater to heat a tent or camper for sleeping after extinguishing the fire.
Another puzzler: Warnings on the heaters required "adequate ventilation" for any inside safe use. As Coleman instructs, to safely use a heater inside a tent or camper, windows or tent flaps must be open, which obviously lets in cold air, defeating the purpose of using the heater.
After selling more than a million Focus heaters, Coleman discontinued selling them in 1996. It sold a redesigned camping heater, called the Focus 15B, for less than two years, and the company launched a new line of heaters, called Powermates, in 1996. Although the Powermates were similar in function and design to the Focus bulk-mount heaters, Coleman promoted and sold them as "industrial heaters." (3) Until 2004, Coleman manufactured and sold the Powermates in 12,000-, 15,000-, 17,000-, and 45,000-Btu models. The Powermates present the same hazards to campers as the Focus heaters.
The first Coleman heater deaths were recorded in the early 1990s. In 1991, six campers--two adults and four children--in Massachusetts died while sleeping in...
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