On June 27, 2020, a 14-year-old young lady from northwest Iowa sustained massive, internal orifice injuries when she fell off the back of a Sea-Doo personal watercraft and came into contact with the blast of water emanating from the watercraft’s jet thrust propulsion system. At the time of the accident, SVD was riding as the rearmost passenger on her uncle’s 2007 Bombardier Sea-Doo RXT.
Shortly after the accident, which occurred on Lake Okoboji in Northwest Iowa, SVD was rushed to a nearby emergency room for life-saving medical intervention. The damage to her colon was so severe that she was forced to undergo the surgical implantation of a colsotomy bag.
Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP) has been sued dozens of times over the past three decades by women that, like SVD, sustained severe internal orifice injuries upon falling off the back of BRP manufactured PWCs. So not only is BRP well aware of the nature, mechanism and severity of PWC orifice injuries, but it is also aware of the fact that such injuries have continued to occur on its products for over thirty years (and, not surprisingly, with increased frequency as increasingly more powerful machines are manufactured and released into the market). Likewise, there is a mountain of evidence establishing BRP’s knowledge of the existence of safer alternative designs which would prevent injuries such as those sustained by SVD from occurring, including (but not limited to) BRP owned patents of modified seat designs and handholds with the stated purpose of reducing the risk of rearward ejections.
Despite this knowledge, BRP has chosen to violate core safety engineering principles by trying to warn its way out of a design defect. Laughery, Kenneth et al. “The Safety Hierarchy and Its Role in Safety Decisions.” www.safetyhumanfactors.org.
SVD is being represented by Mazzola Law Firm, PLLC. The case, styled SVD v. BRP, Inc., was filed in Dickinson County, Iowa on October 14, 2020.
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