In a Shuttered Gasoline Can Factory, the Two Sides of Product Liability

Now, the lobbying group’s Institute for Legal Reform is showing a 30-second commercial that uses Blitz USA, a bankrupt Oklahoma gasoline can manufacturer, to illustrate the consequences of abusive lawsuits. The ad shows tearful workers losing their jobs and the lights going out at the 46-year-old company as a result of steep legal costs from lawsuits targeting the red plastic containers, according to the company and the institute.

The closing of the 117-employee operation this summer became a rallying point for proponents of tort reform. But the commercial ducks the complexities of the product liability cases surrounding Blitz by making no mention of the dozens of casualties linked to explosions while people used the cans in recent years. In interviews, the company and the lawyers suing it seek to frame the conflict in stark terms: devious lawyers with spurious claims piling on a valuable manufacturer, or a greedy company hurting consumers by refusing to fix a defective product.

The Blitz cases show the inherent conflicts “between makers of products that have some hazard or danger and consumers who on occasion are injured by those products,” said Marshall S. Shapo, an expert on product liability at Northwestern University School of Law. “It is an ancient rivalry that will go on forever.”

The suits generally make the claim that the cans were susceptible to “flashback” explosions caused when gasoline vapors outside the cans ignited and followed the vapor trail back into the container. The lawyers argue that the company should have installed “flame arrester” shields at the mouth of the containers to prevent explosions.

Blitz executives note that the company, which was the nation’s leading gas can producer, sold more than 14 million cans a year over the last decade, with fewer than two reported incidents per million cans sold. The company said the most serious incidents usually involved obvious misuse of the cans, like pouring gasoline on an open fire.

Frank J. Vandall, an Emory University law professor, said there was probably no way Blitz could have avoided at least some of the lawsuits, although he questioned why the company paid settlements if it thought it could win in court.

“There is no way you can avoid liability for a can like this,” Mr. Vandall said, “because there is going to be injury, and when there is injury, there is going to be lawsuits.”

Blitz has been sued 62 times since 1994, according to the company. Only two cases have made it to court; the others were settled or dismissed, or were unresolved at the time of the bankruptcy. The company says the cases cost it $30 million in legal fees. Insurance companies paid well over $30 million more in settlements and other payouts.

The gas can explosions can be powerful. In one case, two emergency workers heard an explosion more than two miles away. In a 2010 test, a federal fire research laboratory found that a two-gallon gasoline container could produce a flame jet 13 feet long.

Chad Funchess, a volunteer firefighter from South Carolina, was seriously burned over half his body in 2007 when he was filling up a chain saw in the back of his convenience store and the can exploded. In his lawsuit, Mr. Funchess said there was no open flame to set off the blast. But the company said the store was razed before it could investigate what happened. Mr. Funchess said his fiancée left him when he was hospitalized. The case was stayed when the company filed for bankruptcy, and is one of 36 cases still open.

In the one case Blitz lost, in 2010, a Utah jury awarded more than $4 million to the father of a 2-year-old girl killed when a Blitz can exploded after the father, David Calder, tried to start a fire in a wood-burning stove in his trailer home by pouring gasoline on the flame.