Well, except for the fact that at 79 years of age, it would be unlikely for her to go on to reproduce.
Hope everyone had a great Christmas. I’ve been away and just got back, so…
No, I’m simply saying you cannot determine the exact temp of the coffee simply based on the injury. You have to consider length of exposure because that is a significant factor. All I’m saying is that 160º coffee at a longer time of exposure can potentially cause just as severe injury at 180º coffee at shorter exposure time. Again, length of exposure to heat is a significant factor. Without knowing the details of the exposure (including her actions upon exposure), we’re just guesstimating the temp.
Yes, it’s plausible. For the woman to have significantly reduced her time of exposure and severity of burn, she would have needed to expose her skin to cooling air or water. She was in a car, presumably with no water. The only alternative I can see would be to quickly jump out of the car and remove her soaked clothing. Did she do that? I haven’t heard anyone say that she did. And yes, I think that, in the heat of the moment (pardon the pun), it’s reasonable to assume that the woman didn’t take logical steps to significantly reduce her exposure. Often, people have trouble thinking logically when reacting to extreme situations. Evidence in this case to the contrary would sway me, however.
Coffee is inevitably going to be spilled on someone, at some point. Things get spilled in restaurants. It may be the customer’s fault, it may be an employee’s, or it may just be a complete, unpredictable accident. How could a company not have the responsibility to make sure that when the inevitable accident occured, a customer wasn’t seriously injured? Things spill!
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Yes, they do. Yes, accidents happen. Yes, people are careless. And yes, employees and customers are frequently exposed to potentially dangerous or harmful situations and products all the time, but that doesn’t automatically mean the company is at fault. Reasonable care should be exercised at all times. The company cannot be held responsible when reasonable care is not exercised. Unless they directly caused the accident to occur in the first place.
Absolutely, and I would hope they did. But it wasn’t a defect with the product that caused the accident. It was a lack of reasonable care in handling. If coffee is spilled resulting in serious injury and it was due to employee mishandling, I would expect McDonald’s to take responsibility. If it was as a result of customer mishandling, McDonald’s is simply not responsible unless the product was defective in some manner. Hot coffee is NOT defective. Styrofoam or paper cups that have some give and are not as rigid as ceramic are not defective either.
Of the millions of cups of coffee that were sold in the previous 10-year period, only 700 claims of injury as a result of spillage were brought. That’s got to account for something. That means it’s not unreasonable to expect people not to spill their coffee in a manner that causes serious injury. Even McDonald’s “superheated” radioactive coffee. :rolleyes:
A cite might be helpful because I’m curious as to how it was determined that the coffee was whatever temperature people claim it was and how that relates to the trial determination that her exposure was 2 to 7 seconds. As we’ve already seen via Dead Badger’s link (here’s another one from burnfoundation.org), third degree burns can develop in just five seconds of exposure at 140º F. That appears to be a generally accepted reasonable temp to serve coffee, but it’s still potentially seriously harmful. Still I haven’t seen any cite of her actions to more accurately represent her length of exposure to the heat. Just more circumstantial evidence. Her pants obviously acted as an insulator (sweatpants, right?) retaining the heat, so it seems plausible that the coffee was lower in temp than the oft-presumed temps but the conditions were such that the skin was exposed to the lower temp for a greater amount of time.
Cite? Already demonstrated as incomplete data and, therefore, insubstantial evidence.
And as the time of exposure increases.
Wrong. If exposure is 30 seconds at 170º as compared to 0.5 seconds at 190º You can’t determine temp, within a 20º range at this level, by severity of injury without taking into consideration length of exposure. Period.
You know, this sounds all well and good, but it still don’t see how it’s beside the point. If you’re reducing exposure to the thermal energy then you’re reducing absorption. If you’re creating a barrier for thermal energy to disperse, it has but one way to go. She wasn’t necessarily immersed in the liquid, she was immersed in the heat from the liquid. The heat which was retained in the clothing (designed to create a heat barrier) soaked with the liquid. It seems to me that introducing cooler air is a common method of dispersing thermal energy. Otherwise, why do you blow on a burn or something hot?
Let’s try a simple formula (I’m not fabulous at math, so perhaps other dopers can improve upon it):
T + tE = dB
whereas, Temperature + time of Exposure = degree of Burn
Did you miss the post that mentioned the dissipation of heat in spilled coffee? Spill a hot cup of coffee in your lap and its temperature will dropped preciptously as it becomes exposed to room temperature, especially if the spill causes the liquid to spread out over a large surface area. The estimates you gave about time and temperature vs burn severity neglect to account for a rather basic physical property of hot objects exposed to cooler air.
The fact that the plaintiff suffered major burns in a matter of seconds strongly suggest that the coffee was very hot. Not just hot hot, but close to boiling.
Guesstimating? If it’s already been established that McDonald’s had a history of selling almost-boiling-hot coffee and the plaintiff in this case got so badly burned that her cooch will never smile again, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the coffee was at an unsafe temperature. There is no need to pinpoint an exact temperature here.
It seems to me that by the time the old lady registered what happened, flung open the door, and then proceeded to tear off her clothes (with fingers that might have been stiffen with rheumatism, who knows?), most of the damage would have been done. But let’s say she did do all of that and therefore only suffered 2nd degree burns. Does that mean the coffee wasn’t at an unsafe temperature?
I think most of us would have a hard time thinking logically whilst our labia (or scrota) are fusing together. Since that seems to be a universal phenomenon, hinging a civil suit on whether or not the plaintiff did all the “right” things at the time of incident seems rather unfair to me. If my new jacket spontaneously combusted while I was wearing it and I, panic-stricken and on fire, took off running like Forrest Gump and ended up with 3rd degree burns all over my body, the decision to award me money from the jacket manufacterer should not be affected by me not properly extinguishing the blaze by stopping, dropping, and rolling. The incident itself may have impacted my ability to make rational decisions.
That depends. What was the nature of the claims? Were any similar to this woman’s? How does the claim rate compare to other resturants of similar ubiquity? You can’t look at a statistic and conclude things about it without having a reference point.
Except for the fact that her crotch area was covered by yet another layer of clothing which represented yet another barrier to room temperature. I don’t know about you but my crotch area is somewhat warmer than the top of my leg. Due to the fact that it’s closer to my core (the hottest part of my body) and it’s relatively covered up and protected. Incidently, the skin down there (while not compromising a very large area) is quite a bit more sensitive and therefore more susceptible to more extreme injuries at the same temp than the skin on my leg or arm.
And that the skin itself was more susceptible to extreme injury. And that the conditions were right to precipitate the extreme injury.
Unsafe for the conditions present, yes. Defective, or unreasonably hot, no.
But that’s what you guys keep doing. To prove that McDonald’s was negligent in harming this lady. The very question is, “Was McDonald’s coffee too hot?” To answer that, you’ll need to establish a temperature.
Hello? I’ve never said hot coffee can’t hurt you. All I’ve said is that because inherently it can, it requires proper handling and precaution. Something this lady did not demonstrate. Keep putting words in my mouth.
Try imagining that there’s a difference between a product that can be inherently harmful and a defective product. I would think a jacket that suddenly bursts into flames would be considered defective. :rolleyes:
Yes, what was the nature of the claims? Were they all accidents? Were some of them as a result of using the product as it was intended (i.e., mouth burns)? Why can’t I conclude that a vast majority of McDonald’s customers had no problems whatsoever with the product this woman had a very significant problem handling? Perhaps because a majority of them didn’t use their knees as a vice on a hot cup of coffee? Why couldn’t McDonald’s and any jury conclude that a million to one, you’ll be just fine if you don’t do this?
Wait, wait. Don’t tell me…
Because we are all horrified at the woman’s injuries and it wouldn’t be right for a big corporation to profit in the face of FUSED LABIA.
Well, I seriously doubt even scalding hot water can cause fusing. Third degree burns are understandable and expected, but lets not let hyperbole get too far out. Now if somebody can provide linkage I might be more inclined to believe that scalding hot water is sufficient to fuse.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone’s going to be in here to soon with links to scientific data on scalds resulting in fusing. I would imagine not too many people manage to accomplish this feat.
I could be wrong though. This is the SDMB. 
I guess 3rd degree burns from coffee doesn’t strike you as unreasonable. But it makes that impression on me.
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But that’s what you guys keep doing. To prove that McDonald’s was negligent in harming this lady. The very question is, “Was McDonald’s coffee too hot?” To answer that, you’ll need to establish a temperature.
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Perhaps a temperature range, but not an exact temperature. Anything over 190 degrees would be unreasonable for a cup of coffee moving between two hands. You could posit that perhaps the coffee that had burned the woman had been at 160, but that is far less plausible than it being above 190, given the nature of the wounds as well as basic thermodynamics.
Hello? right back at you. When did I put words in your mouth?
And how would that affect the analogy I set forth, Mrs. Queen of the Rolleyes? The principal is the same. After the incident has occurred, whether or not the victim behaves according to logic should not remove the product manufacturer from blame. Especially since panic is a common side effect of trauma.
You can conclude anything you want, but don’t presume your conclusion is relevant or even accurate. Some people may have had minor problems with the coffee temperature but didn’t file a complaint. Those who did file complaints may have had minor problems. Others may have had major problems but didn’t file complaints. And others still may have had major problems and filed complaints. Without knowing what the complaints were like and more importantly, how they compare to the industry standard, you will not know if McDonald’s performance was typical.
(It looks like in addition to thermodynamics, you are also a bit lacking in the statistical inferences department. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.)
Like you said earlier, coffee spills are inevitable. Even if reasonably precautions are taken, coffee will spill, somewhere, someplace. The plaintiff in the case did not charge McDonald’s with negligence for serving her coffee in a vehicle. She charged them for serving it at a dangerous temperature. Coffee served too hot has the potential of hurting people who do practice prudence. If I’m holding a brimming cup of almost-boiling-coffee and someone bumps my arm, causing the whole lot of it to fall into my lap, I may expect a lot of pain, but permanent tissue damage? Skin grafts? Hospitalization? Genital mutilation? No!
It was dumb for the plaintiff to hold her coffee between her knees. But it seems as if you have fixated on this without considering the larger point. If the plaintiff had accidentally dropped her coffee into her lap, the burns would have probably been similar. Would her case suddenly have more merit to you?
Well, if that’s the case, then 140º coffee is unreasonably hot. It can give you third degree burns in five seconds. If you’re that concerned about safety, better keep it under 120º F which, in 10 minutes, can produce third degree burns as recommended by the American Journal of Health. So much for hot coffee.
If it can be demonstrated that there is no way trapped 160º liquid can produce the kind of injury present in the location and under the conditions of this case in under five minutes, I would concede. I just believe this is plausible. It’s been documented that 160º can cause severe third degree burns in a very short time even without such an environment (trapped heat, very sensitive area of the body, elderly woman). I realize I’m not an expert on thermodynamics, but I can’t believe the conditions didn’t exacerbate the injury whatsoever. The extent of the burn seems to be a result of many factors all coinciding into one unfortunate situation.
My apologies. I misunderstood your question. To answer it, if the result was only second degree burns, the coffee is still not unsafe. The caveat here is with proper handling. Yes, hot water or coffee or radioactive material are certainly all potentially very harmful, but not necessarily unsafe with the proper handling and precaution. And yes, accidents happen. That’s why they are called accidents. Not expectants. If McDonald’s served all their food based on accidents that could (and even do) happen, you’d be eating your hamburger in small non-choking hazard chunks.
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And how would that affect the analogy I set forth, Mrs. Queen of the Rolleyes? The principal is the same. After the incident has occurred, whether or not the victim behaves according to logic should not remove the product manufacturer from blame. Especially since panic is a common side effect of trauma. It’s not the same. Your analogy doesn’t work because you’re comparing a defective product to a product that behaves exactly as expected. In the sense that’s its perfectly logical the product would be found at a temperature at least 20º less than its prepared at. I’m flabbergasted that people would actually not realize that coffee could burn you. Severely. It just seems so bleeding obvious to me.
I just can’t for the life of me understand why I represent such an aberration. To be able to identify that which could possibly hurt me, to treat it with a bit more respect and attention to safety. To suffer the consequences if I don’t. In the event no one else caused the accident, to recognize my own culpability or, even just plain, bad luck.
Well, you conclude that this paltry number of complaints represents an enormous problem. I don’t. I see it as a small, isolated problem with many contributing factors. Lo and behold, coffee is still being served at temperatures above 170º even after the infamous case. And the general public has settled down and enjoyed their hot coffee without much fanfare. But statistically, that is insignificant. Some customers are even asking for it hotter! But now that we’ve got this handy little warning in teeny miniscule print on each dangerous cup, the public is safe and corporations are now seen as acting responsibly.
I’m kind of curious what the industry standard is now with all the coffee chains and independents popping up all over the place. In retrospect looks like McDonalds’ policy wasn’t that out of line at all.
Okay then. If you say so.
But the people who practice prudence aren’t complaining when McDonald’s does nothing wrong. Lots of things are dangerous, ya see. Even things other people and entities expose you to. Life is not a bubble.
Yes. Yes. Yes! Because it wouldn’t likely have been an issue if she hadn’t. Statistics again: millions of people safely consume hot coffee every single day! That is the point!
:smack:
Again, not defective product performing exactly as reasonably expected. Defective handling causing unintended use of product resulting in severe injury. Do you really want me to answer this question AGAIN?
Gah! I messed up my quotes.
It’s not the same. Your analogy doesn’t work because you’re comparing a defective product to a product that behaves exactly as expected. In the sense that’s its perfectly logical the product would be found at a temperature at least 20º less than its prepared at. I’m flabbergasted that people would actually not realize that coffee could burn you. Severely. It just seems so bleeding obvious to me.
I just can’t for the life of me understand why I represent such an aberration. To be able to identify that which could possibly hurt me, to treat it with a bit more respect and attention to safety. To suffer the consequences if I don’t. In the event no one else caused the accident, to recognize my own culpability or, even just plain, bad luck.
Well, you conclude that this paltry number of complaints represents an enormous problem. I don’t. I see it as a small, isolated problem with many contributing factors. Lo and behold, coffee is still being served at temperatures above 170º even after the infamous case. And the general public has settled down and enjoyed their hot coffee without much fanfare. But statistically, that is insignificant. Some customers are even asking for it hotter! But now that we’ve got this handy little warning in teeny miniscule print on each dangerous cup, the public is safe and corporations are now seen as acting responsibly.
…
Addendum: I didn’t properly respond to your question regarding reaction in a panic situation because I was overwhelmed by the completely incomparable analogy. You’re right, of course. The relevance of my statement is only that the that the conditions present could have exacerbated the injury and the injury itself might have been reduced by quick thinking. It may even demonstrate that McDonald’s was not liable in that the coffee wasn’t as hot as you think as, were the conditions different, the resulting injury would have been more in line that normally associated with a lesser exposures.
This is where you’re running into confusion:
Your appromixmate formula has a missing variable: volume of fluid.
The severity of burn is determined by how much heat is conducted into the tissue. For a splash scalding, there’s a fixed amount of thermal energy involved, dependent on how much fluid is held directly against the skin.
Yes, you can receive severe (even fatal) burns from water held at 150 degrees, which most people would agree is an unsatisfactorily cool temperature at which to serve coffee. Not by spilling a cup in your lap, though. You would need a much larger volume of fluid – either via a continuous pour from a large vessel (such as a hot water tank) or by immersion. When you’re talking about burns from a spill in your lap, you’re talking about the finite amount of thermal energy contained in the fluid absorbed by your clothes. As heat is conducted into your body, that liquid rapidly cools. This is basic thermodynamics.
Even if the coffee is between 165 and 175 degrees, which is is hot hot hot, the burn is going to be nowhere near as severe. Your post-spill actions don’t enter into it in any significant way – it all comes down to how much thermal energy is contained in the liquid held directly against your skin. If it’s at regular coffee temperature, then after about five seconds you’re going to have a painful burn that’s going to make you uncomfortable for about a week. If it’s barely off the boil, you’re going to be in and out of the hospital for a year or so, having skin grafts, having your pudenda reconstructed, trying to minimize nasty infections, all that fun stuff.
This is the point. It has been determined that the cup of coffee that McDonald’s dispensed that day was a defective product, in the strictest possible sense of the word. McDonald’s acknowledged that they were serving their coffee at a temperature which was much, much hotter than the expected serving temperature. Their rationale was that, while each cup was too hot to consume at point of sale, they maintained that temperature for the subset of their customers who would be waiting twenty minutes or so before consuming it. They were aware of the severity of burns that their product was causing, they were further aware that it was unusual for coffee to injure people to that extraordinary degree, but they considered that the extra risk presented to every consumer of their product was worth it in order to encourage people to take McDonald’s coffee back to work with them.
Clearly, people do not expect to have their lives irrevocably changed by a slip with a cup of coffee – precisely because their expectations of the way coffee ordinarily behaves does not admit cooking your flesh down to the bone within a few seconds. If people really considered coffee to be that dangerous, it’s certainly not something they would casually order at the drive-through window.
You expect to get burned if you dump your coffee in your lap. You expect it to suck. Every single person who consumes hot bevvies does a little bit of risk/benefit analysis on the whole thing, and most people agree that it’s well worth the risk. The risk that we’re talking about there doesn’t admit the type of extensive injuries that Mrs. Liebeck suffered, though.
Of course. 175 degree coffee is a world of difference from 190 or 195 degree coffee, though. Even still, there may be times when it’s perfectly sensible to serve coffee at 190 degrees – say, when you’re serving coffee at an outdoor location in February, like film caterers or construction crews do. The risk is hugely minimized in these situations because it’s consumed standing up, and the ambient temperature means accelerated cooling, and there’s an added benefit of it staying warm longer in the cold.
When you’re dispensing coffee directly to people in nice warm cars, the risks/benefits stack up hugely differently. People in cars are all lap and strapped in. There are no tables. Spills will happen, and they will happen to people in control of moving vehicles.
McDonald’s was negligent. This doesn’t mean coffee shoudln’t be served piping hot. Of course it should. It’s just that there’s a very big grade that exists between “piping hot” and “unreasonably dangerously hot.”
The odd thing about this rationale is that by serving it so hot for the convenience of those customers who wanted to drink it later they were serving it too hot for the customers who wanted to drink it right away. I hated McDonalds coffee because it was so damn hot I had to wait for it to cool. I order coffee because I want coffee now. I don’t think “hey, I want coffee in 20 minutes, so I better go buy it now”. It’s such a poor rationale that I think they made it up to cover their ass.