Can businesses be held responsible for spoiled food during power outages?
Serving Food without Power
For those of us who live in the Tulsa area or the greater northeastern Oklahoma, green country as we call it, a few weeks ago, we endured and survived extremely strong winds exceeding 90 miles to a hundred miles per hour, known as a straight wind or straight line wind. Some people would call it a wall cloud in other parts of the country. Did lots of damage. 200,000 people or more, and that includes businesses that lost power.
I’m Mike Ashworth. I’m an Oklahoma personal injury lawyer. I’ve been doing law for about 39, 40 years. I want to talk to you about what happens in storms and what can bring about the possibility of a lawsuit.
A Recipe for Liability
You’re a restaurant, you serve food and you survive by serving food and lots of food. All of a sudden you have a major breakdown and loss of power for several days. Now, a lot of people that have generators in this part of the country have it specifically to protect one major appliance and that’s the refrigerator and all the food in there. Because what happens if you don’t? Well, people were scrambling like mad in June to go out and get 10 pounds, 15 pounds, 20 pounds bags of ice to try to save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of food. And those are people that are residential.
Now, let’s talk about the businesses, the businesses that serve food that can perish. Chicken, fish, meat. What happens then? And what happens if they think it’s still good, even though they may get a generator? Now, I’ll tell you right now, most dining establishments do not have generators. But let’s say that after three, four days, they’re able to get a generator. Well, what happened to that food for the three to four days before they got the generator? Well, it probably is not frozen like it was.
When Unsafe Food Becomes a Legal Issue
So could someone be liable? Could you have a personal injury case because somebody knowingly was serving food or should have known they were serving food? That’s not safe for human consumption at that point. The answer is yes. Seeing that happen, hearing of it happening, and reading about it happening, have handled some of those.
Contact Us for a Free Consultation
So if that happens to you, then you come to us and go to TulsaPersonalInjuryLawyer.pro or call me, Tulsa personal injury attorney Mike Ashworth, at 918-924-5528. We’ll help you. And if you have any other legal questions, not just about that, but about legal matters in general, as I said, I’ve been doing this for almost 40 years, handled a lot of different areas of law. I’ll be happy to hook you up with the right lawyers to talk to answer your questions. Give us a call.
