9/20/2019 Goodyear ordered to pay $6.

7M for death from exploding tire - The Washington Post

The Washington Post

National

Goodyear ordered to pay $6.7M for death from exploding

tire

By Janet McConnaughey | AP
September 18

NEW ORLEANS — Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. must pay more than $6.7 million in damages in
the death of a garbage truck driver killed when a tire he was inflating exploded, a judge in a New
Orleans suburb has ruled.

Elwood Breaux Jr. was working for Plaquemines Parish when the “zipper failure” — named for a
long sidewall rip with protruding metal reinforcement — occurred. Escaping air slammed Breaux
backward on Feb. 5, 2014. He died 28 days later of massive internal injuries to his chest and
abdomen, State District Judge Michael Clement wrote.

He calculated damages to Breaux, his five children and his wife at $6.7 million but said about
$481,000 of that will reimburse the parish for workers’ compensation. State law will return some
of that to the family’s share and judicial interest will add at least $1.4 million to the total, New
Orleans attorney Danny Meeks, who represented the family, said Wednesday.

Clement ruled Sept. 10 that Goodyear failed to adequately warn the parish that an
underpressurized tire might explode during inflation.

“We are disappointed with the verdict and will appeal,” said a statement emailed Tuesday by
James Peate, Goodyear’s director of global functions communications in Akron, Ohio.

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9/20/2019 Goodyear ordered to pay $6.7M for death from exploding tire - The Washington Post

Clement wrote that warnings about the possibility of serious injury from tire failure were
embossed on the tire in the same color as the tire and also were written on the back of invoices
sent to the parish and in a warranty brochure sent to the parish. However, he found that those
were inadequate, noting that an expert witness in human factors engineering and warnings
testified that they didn’t advise “that a tire would blow up by simply being aired up.”

That expert, Lila Laux, also testified that the warnings “did not tell a user what a zipper failure
was, what caused it, how to avoid it, or how to avoid being injured.” Rather, she concluded that the
warnings would be read as saying underinflated or overloaded tires might fail on the road,
Clement wrote. The opinion said that was how Scott Rousselle, superintendent at the parish’s Solid
Waste North department, testified he interpreted them.

Zipper failure lawsuits are fairly rare, said Skip Lynch, another attorney for the family. He said his
firm in Ocala, Florida, files 20 to 30 tire-related lawsuits a year, and its last one involving this sort
of explosion was decided six or eight years ago.

It’s likely that most of the time, nobody’s close enough to the break to be hurt, Lynch said. But
when someone is, he said, “it’s like having a small to midsize truck hit you.”

Rousselle, department foreman Matthew Bougere and a co-worker all testified that they had never
heard of zipper failures, Clement wrote.

He said the manager and service manager at the store that sold the tires testified they had never
heard of zipper failures or seen a Goodyear product service bulletin that did describe them and
how to avoid them.

Bougere also testified that he saw Breaux regularly check tire pressure and that in 25 years at Solid
Waste North, “there had never been a problem with fixing a tire or a tire exploding while it was
fixed,” Clement wrote.

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9/20/2019 Goodyear ordered to pay $6.7M for death from exploding tire - The Washington Post

He calculated damages for Breaux himself at more than $1.5 million, including $400,000 for pain
and suffering. Despite heavy sedation, surgeon Mark Kappelman testified that Breaux could move,
grunt or groan when asked about pain and had to be “kept in restraints to keep him from pulling
out the devices to which he had been hooked up,” the judge wrote.

Breaux’s wife, Irene Breaux, was awarded $1.5 million, including $1 million for mental anguish,
grief and anxiety. Their three children were awarded $750,000 to $800,000 each, and Breaux’s
adult daughters by his first wife $300,000 each.

The attorneys’ percentage is a private matter between them and their clients, Lynch said.

Copyright 2019 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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