Mirro Pressure Cooker Lawsuit Filed Over Safety System Failures, Burn Injuries
The makers of Mirro Pressure Cookers face a product liability lawsuit alleging safety features do not work properly, which caused a woman to suffer severe burn injuries when a pressure cooker exploded.
I-isha Hudson filed the complaint (PDF) in New Jersey Superior Court on September 3, naming Groupe SEB USA, doing business as Mirro, as a defendant, as well as a number of unnamed individuals and corporations involved with the pressure cookers’ manufacture and distribution.
According to the lawsuit, Hudson, of Texas, suffered serious and substantial burn injuries when she rotated and opened the pressure cooker lid without knowing the contents still were under pressure. Safety system failures allowed the lid to be removed, causing her to be sprayed with the scalding hot contents, the lawsuit alleges.
“The incident occurred as a result of the failure of the pressure cooker’s supposed ‘safety systems,’ which purport to keep the consumer safe while using the pressure cooker,” Hudson said in her lawsuit. “In addition, the incident occurred as the result of the Defendant’s failure to redesign the pressure cooker, despite the existence of economical, safer alternative designs.”
The Mirro pressure cooker lawsuit claims the design is defective, and that the manufacturers knew or should have known about the risks, yet put profits ahead of consumer safety by failing to warn them of the devices defects and failing to issue a Mirro Pressure Cooker recall.
The case joins a growing number of similar pressure cooker lawsuits filed in recent months, each raising similar allegations about unreasonably dangerous designs and defective safety features on several modern designs, including products sold under the Instant Pot, Crock-Pot, Ninja Foodi and other popular brands.
The most common pressure cooker injuries occur when the safety features fail to prevent the lid from being removed while the contents are still under high pressure, which can result in burns ranging from first to third degree, and typically cover a large percentage of a person’s body. These types of burn injuries can leave patients prone to infections and sometimes requiring amputations. However, other injuries linked to pressure cookers have included eye injuries, broken bones and other complications that resulted from electrocutions, spills or explosions.
As more of these electric pressure cookers have been introduced in recent years, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued several pressure cooker recalls over problems where lids were able to be opened while contents are under pressure, allowing hot contents to be expelled and causing a scald or burn injury to individuals in the immediate area.
Most recently, a massive Crock-Pot recall was issued in November 2020, impacting nearly 1 million 6-Quart Express Crock Multi-Cookers with lid locking defects, after at least 99 burn injuries were reported.