The High Court has dismissed a woman’s personal injuries action against the operator of the Esplanade Hotel, finding that she had not proved the alleged negligence over an electric kettle in her room. The court did not determine what caused the accident.
The judgment of Mr Justice Garrett Simons, delivered on 8 April 2022, concerned an incident during a one-night stay on 22 July 2019. The plaintiff said the kettle “exploded” while she was making a drink shortly before midnight, causing burns to her back and neck. Her former boyfriend, who was in the room, described a loud noise and water bursting from the kettle. The judge later found his account unreliable and prone to exaggeration.
The plaintiff’s case was that the hotel had failed to ensure kettles in its rooms were properly checked and maintained, allowing limescale to block the kettle’s filter. She argued that the blockage prevented steam escaping and caused the incident. The kettle was inspected jointly by forensic engineers for both sides in September 2020, but its detachable filter was missing. The judge said there was no evidence that the hotel had improperly or carelessly caused the filter to go missing.
The court found, on the balance of probabilities, that the filter was not clogged. The plaintiff had used the kettle earlier that evening without difficulty, and the engineers found no limescale build-up on the kettle. Tests under several conditions produced no large escape of water. Expert evidence also indicated that the kettle was not airtight and that steam could escape even if the filter were blocked.
The judge identified other conflicts between the boyfriend’s description and the expert evidence, including the claimed 180-degree movement of the lid and the pattern of the plaintiff’s injuries. He concluded that neither a clogged filter nor the alleged causal link between a clogged filter and the incident had been established.
The court said it was not necessary to decide what actually caused the accident. It did not find that the plaintiff overfilled the kettle or knocked it over; those were possibilities mentioned in the judgment. The plaintiff bore the burden of proving negligence, and the defendant was not required to establish an alternative explanation. The proceedings were dismissed.
Costs were not finally determined in the judgment. The judge said the usual position would entitle the defendant to seek its measured costs, and set deadlines for written submissions on any different costs order. The case was listed for final orders on 27 May 2022.