BURNING QUESTIONS

Steve: The procedure is fine.  I often test “functional flow” by going to the bathroom furthest away from the main water shutoff, turning everything on, and then flushing the toilet.  I work under Inter-NACHI’s Standards of Practice (SOP).  That test will tell you if the lady has to dance in the shower to get wet!

But the word “steam” never even shows up in any bathroom plumbing SOP.

“Functional flow” has to be checked under Inter-NACHI and NAHI, but it is not mentioned in the ASHI SOP.  (One more strike for those who say all three SOP are “the same.” Everyone who says that, you can be sure, simply has not read them – or taken the PLI class on SOP.)  Inter-NACHI inspectors must “report as in need of correction” any “deficiencies in the water supply by viewing the functional flow in two fixtures operated simultaneously.”  Inter-NACHI 3.6.III.A.   NAHI inspectors “test the water supply for functional flow.” 10.2.9.   ASHI says inspectors are “not required” to “measure water supply flow and pressure,” though “measure”is the operative word there.  ASHI 6.2.C.

All three SOP  require inspectors to inspect “water heating equipment” and “interior water supply, including all fixtures and faucets, by running the water” and the “drain, waste and vent system,” quoting Inter-NACHI.  ASHI 6.1.A.3, 4; Inter-NACHI 3.6.I.C.,D; NAHI 10.1.4.   They do not have to be “described.”  Inspectors specifically are “not required” to “measure the temperature of the water heater.” 3.6.IV.B.

Hot water, and steam, are another issue.  Hot water temperatures got to be a big deal ever since the legendary 1994 “McDonald’s hot coffee” case, where a woman spilled really hot coffee in her lap and got a breathtaking $2.9 million jury award.  It became urban legend.

Like most hype, there was more smoke than fire.  The $2.9 million sounds pretty astronomical.  But $200,000 was the lady’s actual damages, like medical bills.  The 79 year-old woman had to be hospitalized for six skin grafts, still ended up permanently disfigured, and was partially disabled for 2 years.  McDonald’s turned down a $20,000 pretrial settlement offer (counter-offering $800) and demanded a trial.  Notice:  McDonald’s insisted it followed “industry standards” serving coffee that hot, so it was OK.

Most of the award, $2.7 million, was “punitive damages.”  Juries mostly punish “bad attitude” or to “send a message.”  I’ve seen juries do some weird things.  Once they start talking millions, it’s like they lose all track of the $20 and $100 bills in their wallets.  But this jury apparently did something simple.  Jurors never said why, but it looks like it based the $2.7 mill on two days worth of McDonald’s coffee sales, which testimony put at $1.35 million per day.  They also learned McDonald’s had reports of about 700 other people burned by its coffee.

Cynics, which includes politicians, latched onto the case, Liebeck v McDonald’s Restaurants, as “the poster child of excessive lawsuits,” as ABC News put it.  Then HBO did a film, Hot Coffee, about how it was enlisted to promote tort reform, even though the trial judge cut the final award to $640,000, and everybody settled for something less soon after, before any appeal.  But facts rarely get in the way of good stories, and that cup of hot coffee has steamed up the whole conversation.

When the lady died in 2004 at 91, her daughter said the settlement paid for her live-in nurse.  Similar lawsuits were filed against other restaurants and even hospitals, but in 1998 the Seventh Circuit federal Court of Appeals put a lid on it, unanimously throwing out a similar lawsuit against coffee maker Bunn-O-Matic.  The court said “179 °F (82 °C) hot coffee was not ‘unreasonably dangerous,’” despite the McDonald’s tempest in a coffee pot.  Today, coffee is served as hot, or hotter, at Starbucks (175–185 °F (79–85 °C)) – and McDonald’s.

The McDonald’s coffee had to be at least 180 degrees to produce the third-degree burns she got, experts testified.  At 180 °F (82 °C), people get third-degree burns (where skin grafts are required) in 12-15 seconds.   Lowering it to 160 °F (71 °C) increases the time to produce such burns to 20 seconds.  Doctors said that, as a general rule, anything hotter than 130 °F (54 °C) constitutes a burn hazard.  So that’s the benchmark in the lawsuit.

The epidermis is the outermost layer of our skin (“epi” = outside + “dermis” = skin. That’s easy.)  It is a protective layer of fatty lipids that keeps pathogens from getting in, and regulates water evaporating out.  It’s like being wrapped in a living membrane roof.  But this wrap can melt away in the heat.  Think of butter on a knife when you’re dishwashing.  The butter stays put under cold water, but it melts away under hot water or steam.

The butter acts a lot like lipid layer of skin when the shower water is over 112 °F.  Dermatologists often tell people that washing the face in water that hot, and then splashing on cold water, does a good job cleaning out pores in the skin and then closing them tightly in the cold, producing brighter, healthy facial skin.  (Cold water is water under 70°F .)

Doctors frequently recommend a showering technique that begins with turning on extra hot water, to steam up the bathroom, then turning it down to lukewarm ( 90-100 °F) to get in the shower.  The idea is to get the moisturizing benefits of hot steam but without the drying and loss  of epidermis – which shows up as reddened skin.

But cold showers?  That’s what happens when you forget your SOPs.