Aetna Casualty & Surety Co. v. Farmers Brothers Co.

Opinion

REARDON, J. This is an appeal from a judgment in favor of respondents Brass Door, Inc. (Brass Door), and its insurer Aetna Casualty & Surety Co. (Aetna) in their product liability action against Farmers Brothers Co. and Brewmatic, Inc. (collectively, Farmers). Farmers’ only contention on appeal is that respondents failed to establish an objective feature of the coffee maker in question—namely, the heating capacity of the high-heat element alleged to have started the fire at Brass Door. We conclude respondents met their burden and therefore affirm the judgment.

I. Facts

Early Sunday morning, April 14, 1994, a fire broke out at the Brass Door restaurant in San Ramon, damaging the building. Nancy Schlesinger and Danny Basso, co-owners of the restaurant, spent $850,000 on debris removal and reconstruction. Aetna provided $560,000 under various insurance policies.

Brass Door was equipped with a coffee maker unit manufactured, installed and maintained by Farmers; the restaurant had no responsibility for its installation or maintenance. Farmers supplied Brass Door with glass coffee pots with plastic handles. A Farmers’ employee had worked on the machine the Thursday before the fire.

Bartender Michael Dickerson closed the restaurant Saturday night and, as usual, turned the coffee maker knob to the off position, leaving it plugged in.

Assigned to investigate the fire for the San Ramon Fire Department was Fire Inspector Geoffrey Aus. After conducting a 10-hour investigation, he concluded that the origin of the fire was in the area of the coffeemaker.

Donald Perkins, hired by Aetna to determine the cause and origin of the fire, concurred. A number of factors contributed to his opinion: First, the coffee station area sustained the greatest fire damage. Further, the bum patterns, method of fighting the fire, the ventilation of the fire and failure rate of windows and skylights all pointed to the coffee maker area as the point of origin. Perkins then identified several heat sources: the coffee [577]maker, an electrical outlet and the conduit that went to it, a wall switch and the service cord to the coffee maker. He eliminated all sources of heat except the coffee maker, leading to the conclusion that “the cause of this fire was from an undetermined malfunction or failure within the coffeemaker [szc] spreading the fire out from that point.” As to the fuel source, Perkins found some plastic embedded in the top burner area and indicated the fire spread from that point up.