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Hot Nacho lawsuit

Alferd_Packer

Philosopher
Alferd_Packer
Joined
Jul 3, 2007
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OK, the McDonalds Hot Coffee lawsuit has a lot of oppinions, but how about the "hot nacho Cheese' lawsuit?

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinat...-nacho-cheese-injury-at-disney-world/142725/1

A Chula Vista. Calif. couple filed suit against Walt Disney Parks and Resorts this week, claiming their 4-year-old son received severe burns during dinner at Orlando's Magic Kingdom last March. According to the family's San Diego-based attorney, Sean Cahill, Isaiah Harris was injured at Cosmic Ray's Starlite Cafe when a paper cup of scalding nacho cheese splashed on his face after he'd grabbed a food tray to keep from falling out of an unsteady chair. The suit claims the child suffered "permanent scarring, pain and suffering" as a result of the burns, and his parents, Michael and Maria Harris, suffered "serious emotional distress"
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That's a heck of a burn.

nacho cheese should NOT be that hot.
 

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In a related item from the same source above:

On Monday, a quadriplegic visitor to Disneyland in Anaheim, Calif. claimed Disney violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not having adequate evacuation procedures for visitors with mobility disabilities. Jose Martinez of San Pedro, Calif. says Disney left him in his wheelchair in the "It's a Small World" ride for 40 minutes after the ride had stalled and other guests had been evacuated during a visit in November, 2009.
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Imagine being stalled on the ride listening to that annoying soundtrack over and over again. . .

"It's a small world after all, It's a small world after all. . .

That would be torture to make the most hardened terrorist crack.
 
Overall, Disney is fantastic about accomodating those with wheelchairs. My roommate is quadraplegic and we've gone to Disneyland together several times. She is able to get onto the majority of rides and the attendants are helpful and friendly.

Compare that to Universal Studios, which is far from wheelchair friendly and where we were made to feel like we were a huge pain just because one person had an injured ankle.

I can't comment too much on this specific case, of course, but I do know that my roommate was often asked if she would be able to get herself off of a ride in the event of an emergency and when she said she couldn't they let her know that in that case the fire department might need to haul her out. She always agreed and we were never on a ride (with her, at least) when it broke so it wasn't an issue but I know that she understood that she could hypothetically be stranded for a while.

In an actual life-threatening fire or something We could have carried her and it would have been a disaster but better than leaving her.
 
Not enough information.

Regarding the poor guy in the wheelchair...you'd think someone would stay with him as he waited for evacuation. I'd feel terrible leaving someone like that even if they were a total stranger.
 
KingMerv00 said:
Not enough information.

Regarding the poor guy in the wheelchair...you'd think someone would stay with him as he waited for evacuation. I'd feel terrible leaving someone like that even if they were a total stranger.
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I would think that some people would actually evacuate him. It seems more like a failure of compassion on the part of the other customers there than of Disney's evacuation procedure.
 
Cavemonster said:
Cue the cries of "But Nacho cheese is supposed to be hot!"
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I can't wait for someone to dig up a study done on the optimal serving temperature for nacho cheese with an industry wide comparison. And then someone will whip out the Taco Bell corporate policy on cheese-like product preparation. Then someone will spend hundreds of posts arguing that they are not in fact serving "nacho cheese" because the rules for tortilla chip manufacturing does not mention cheese, therefore such a product cannot possibly be marketed or sold without violating Canadian laws.

Then someone will blame the Jews.
 
Babbylonian said:
I would think that some people would actually evacuate him. It seems more like a failure of compassion on the part of the other customers there than of Disney's evacuation procedure.
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Not if it's not an emergency. He's quadriplegic, which can mean a lot of things but generally if you're not a child there's some danger of being dropped. You need two people to carry an adult, especially if that adult isn't particularly helpful, and that's assuming that you are used to it.

Now add to that that you are getting someone off of a ride. This means changes in elevation that you have to maneuver because you're getting them off the boat and across that gap up onto the nearest walkway. Probably the two people doing the carrying are facing each other and so they have to be really careful where they're going.

You can't bring the chair with you, guaranteed.

Okay, so you get the guy out with minimal injuries (under MUCH better circumstances we severely sprained my roommate's foot getting her onto Haunted Mansion) and now you have to sit him on a bench or something until... oh, wait. The ride has started working and the chair is on its way out.

Far, far better just to wait. Someone should stay with him, and in the event of an emergency they would indeed need to haul him out, but if they have reason to think that the ride will be up and running soon it's not a bad idea to leave him in there.

Let's also not forget... the Disney staff aren't trained to transfer quadraplegics and they can't encourage random people to do it, so it would need to be someone the person gave consent to. (Except in the event of an evacuation transfer isn't needed for Small World - they have a special boat you can drive your chair right on to - so they may not have someone they know with them that can help them transfer.)
 
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SOdhner said:
Not if it's not an emergency. He's quadriplegic, which can mean a lot of things but generally if you're not a child there's some danger of being dropped. You need two people to carry an adult, especially if that adult isn't particularly helpful, and that's assuming that you are used to it.

Now add to that that you are getting someone off of a ride. This means changes in elevation that you have to maneuver because you're getting them off the boat and across that gap up onto the nearest walkway. Probably the two people doing the carrying are facing each other and so they have to be really careful where they're going.

You can't bring the chair with you, guaranteed.

Okay, so you get the guy out with minimal injuries (under MUCH better circumstances we severely sprained my roommate's foot getting her onto Haunted Mansion) and now you have to sit him on a bench or something until... oh, wait. The ride has started working and the chair is on its way out.

Far, far better just to wait. Someone should stay with him, and in the event of an emergency they would indeed need to haul him out, but if they have reason to think that the ride will be up and running soon it's not a bad idea to leave him in there.

Let's also not forget... the Disney staff aren't trained to transfer quadraplegics and they can't encourage random people to do it, so it would need to be someone the person gave consent to. (Except in the event of an evacuation transfer isn't needed for Small World - they have a special boat you can drive your chair right on to - so they may not have someone they know with them that can help them transfer.)
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That's a lot of analysis that goes right out the window depending on the reason for the "evacuation." I interpreted that word as an emergency situation in which case you're all kinds of wrong, but if it was just a stalled ride then you're right - yet as Merv pointed out, it seems pretty callous to leave one person who can't leave sitting there alone.
 
Alferd_Packer said:
OK, the McDonalds Hot Coffee lawsuit has a lot of oppinions, but how about the "hot nacho Cheese' lawsuit?
...
That's a heck of a burn.

nacho cheese should NOT be that hot.
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Perhaps.

Of course, at this point we don't quite have all the facts

- The burn looks bad, but are there any people here with the medical experience to actually judge just how serious those burns actually are? (The lawsuit claims "permanent scaring", but I'm not sure if that's based on any real medical opinions or not)

- Any idea how hot the cheese was? Was it actually overly hot? (With the hot coffee lawsuit we saw all sorts of statistics regarding burn times at various temperatures. I suspect that the time to burn with a thicker substance like cheese might be less than a comparable amount of liquid.)

I'm not trying to say that this is a baseless lawsuit. Its quite possible that they do keep the cheese hotter than they should. But I'd rather deal with facts and hard data, rather than just an uneducated opinion of how bad a burn looks in a picture.
 
Babbylonian said:
I interpreted that word as an emergency situation in which case you're all kinds of wrong,
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Huh? I did say, "in the event of an emergency they would indeed need to haul him out". The rest of it isn't wrong either, it just might be justified depending on the emergency. There's also the chance that it won't be and they'll wait for the fire department to get him rather than having someone else remove him. That would depend on the specific nature of the emergency, obviously.

Babbylonian said:
but if it was just a stalled ride then you're right
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I've been on multiple broken rides at Disney, it happens ALL the time. In a few cases we had to "evacuate" but that just meant a cast member led us to the nearest exit and I got to see a teeny bit of the backstage area. I would always assume that it's just a stalled ride unless a specific emergency is mentioned.

Babbylonian said:
as Merv pointed out, it seems pretty callous to leave one person who can't leave sitting there alone.
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100% agreed, if the guy is with someone they should be allowed to stay with him. If he is alone a Disney employee should hang out.
 
A Laughing Baby said:
The parents should have supervised their child and stopped him from reaching out for an object to grab on to when he fell? Really?
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I think moreso, make sure your child's char is stable enough that he doesn't have to do that.

Something of this situation seems a bit... money grabby to me. How many parents would see an incredibly wobbly chair and say " Lets put the lil guy in there and hope it works out. "

Also i think there is a pretty good test for if a food was "too hot".

Get a group of 100 males, and ask them if they would be willing to put their wang into the substance. If the majority say no, then the product is something that should be assumed to be hot enough to use caution while using thereby absolving a company of responsibility if it's hot nature causes damage, if no, then said product is not something that one can expect to be hot enough to cause harm.

Who here would be willing to dunk their Johnson in the nacho cheese at 7-11 straight out of the tube?

And all of this is beside the point.

**** happens. The kid fell, after being put in, or being let to sit in a wobbly chair, any three stooges esque situation that results from this is not the fault of the people serving a food designed to be served hot, and like all hot foods is served hotter than edible so that by the time it gets to you, and for a bit after it remains at an eatable temperature.

I mean, what if the kid fell off a chair and landed, randomly on a fork, driving the fork through some soft bit of his body ( eye, throat, etc.) should we now look into making forks harmless? Or can we chalk it up to **** happens, and that we cannot protect everyone from every situation without living in a preschool.
 
Also, i am going to start a class action lawsuit, on behalf of every person that has ever had pizza. How dare those careless , evil, pizza makers serve the pizza that hot. Rise up i say, and show these careless food mongers that we will not take this severe danger to our society, hot food must be eradicated.

We're coming after you next fondue.
 
sadhatter said:
I mean, what if the kid fell off a chair and landed, randomly on a fork, driving the fork through some soft bit of his body ( eye, throat, etc.) should we now look into making forks harmless? Or can we chalk it up to **** happens, and that we cannot protect everyone from every situation without living in a preschool.
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The suit is for damages, not to make something "harmless."

Food that is hot enough to cause 2nd degree burns on contact is too hot to be eaten.

Disney is liable for the injuries to the child.

They will settle out of court.
 
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