McDonough v. Apcom Inc.
 Five
and a half years ago, 15-year-old Matthew Mcdonough
was asleep in his Kem Way Condominium in Walnut when
an electric water heater in an adjoining unit blew up.
The water heater exploded with enough force to go through
two ceilings, a roof and land about 75 feet away from
the home that it was in. The condominium sustained so
much damage that it had to be razed. "It flew through
the kitchen window," Mcdonough said Monday at his
lawyer's Los Angeles office. A Los Angeles jury awarded
McDonough and eight others a total of $2.2 million on
Friday in their suit against Apcom Inc., a Franklin,
Tenn.,-based company that made the controls on the water
heater. Mcdonough-the most seriously injured in the
blast with a broken collarbone and a ruptured spleen
that had to be removed - will receive the lion's share
of the money, $1.37 million.
McDonough, now 21 and looking for work, doesn't remember
what happened in the early morning hours of December
29, 1995. "I just remember waking up in the hospital,"
he said. Apcom lawyer Patrick Quinlivan said jurors
told him after the trial that they agreed with his client's
basic argument- that someone, such as a plumber, must
have done something to the controls for them to malfunction.
"I think what (the jury) decided it on was emotion
and the belief that a water heater shouldn't blow up.
Even though the testimony was that there was no way
to design the device to prevent the contact from fusing
when it was shorted." Quinlivan also said that
the water heater was missing a temperature and pressure
relief valve that would have prevented the explosion.
Garo Mardirossian, a lawyer for several of the plaintiffs,
said the explosion occurred because of a defect in Apcom's
design. Apcom water heater controls are still on the
market and Quinlivan said the company has not had any
similiar occurances with the roughly 20 million others
in use in the U.S. today.
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