December 12, 2012 -- Consumers in California and Florida have filed a lawsuit alleging that the manufacturers of Norcold brand gas absorption refrigerators, used in RVs and boats, knowingly sold defective refrigerators that posed a serious fire risk but hid that information from the public and federal regulators. The class action lawsuit, filed today in Orange County, Calif., seeks relief on behalf of all persons who purchased or owned RVs or boats in California and Florida equipped with three models of Norcold-brand gas absorption refrigerators. The complaint names Norcold, Inc., Thetford Corporation and Dyson-Kissner-Moran Corporation (DKM) as defendants.
The lawsuit alleges that since 1999, Norcold’s refrigerators have caused at least 2,000 fires resulting in millions of dollars in property damage, personal injury and death. The refrigerators contain flammable gases under high pressure, including hydrogen. The gases are heated by electricity or propane to circulate and provide the refrigeration effect. Fires are caused when defects in the refrigerator design release the flammable gases, which can then explosively ignite and spread quickly through the refrigerator compartment and into the passenger area of the RV.
The lawsuit alleges that the companies knew of the potential fire hazard associated with its refrigerators, but rather than eliminate the design and manufacturing defects or provide an adequate warning of the potential safety risks to users of the product they tried to conceal and minimize these dangers through a series of limited manufacturer-initiated product safety recalls through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), beginning in 2000.
In each product safety recall, Norcold represented that there was a single failure modality in a limited portion of their product population. They provided a retrofit that would fix that defect, rendering the refrigerators safe to use. But in truth, the lawsuit alleges, the refrigerators had a number of different failures that were common to all of the product lines, information that was never adequately disclosed to NHTSA or users of the product, nor remedied by the retrofit campaigns. Further it’s alleged that the devices provided by the companies to “fix” the defects were not only ineffective to remedy the propensity of the refrigerators to cause fires, but were designed, when triggered, to render the refrigerators inoperable and unrepairable, requiring users to purchase new refrigerators that contained the same design and manufacturing defects as the originals, and which had the same propensity to cause fires.
According to Caleb Marker, one of the attorneys who represent the RV owners, "One of the fundamental purposes of this litigation is to hold Norcold and its co-defendants accountable for putting an unsafe product into the marketplace when they were fully aware that the product posed a serious risk of devastating fires that cause property damage, injury or death to consumers. It is also unfair for defendants to force consumers to bear the cost of remedying the design defects inherent in their products.”
Consumers can get more information or a copy of the complaint at www.zrclassaction.com.
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