Notwithstanding fleeting, ad hoc respites, Minnesotans spend about five months of every year in uncomfortably cold weather, November 1 through April 1. (The wimps among us would tack on two or three weeks to either end of that, while the thicker-skinned might pare a similar number.)
Either way, it is a fact that, when the weather warms up vitamin D deprived Minnesotans run the risk of underestimating the sun’s destructive power. The hot fireball in the sky is unfamiliar to us. And we’re so eager to soak up every last photon of sunlight in our long summer days.
On a hot summer day in 2012, Michael Barlow was a volunteer corn roaster for the Hospitality Center for Chinese, Inc. (HCC), a nonprofit organization that provides hospitality to college students and their families from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.
Unfortunately, Barlow himself was effectively roasted by the machine and hot sun. Other volunteers failed to show up to help, the picnic premises host, the University of Minnesota, insisted the roaster not be placed in shade, as had been done in prior years’ HCC picnics. (The U of M was not being fickle or sadistic. The university required that the corn roaster be placed in a different location near a permanent grounding rod that the university had installed that year.)
Toward the end of the day, Mr. Barlow collapsed from dehydration and heat exhaustion, was injured, and sued HCC because, his lawyers argued, HCC owed Mr. Barlow a duty of care, should have taken care of him, and should have taken measures so that he would not been in this risky roasting situation.
Mr. Barlow lost his case. The court found that the HCC did not have the duty that Mr. Barlow sought to impose on it. “When a volunteer undertakes to do a task, ‘he does so at his own risk.’”
The district court concluded that Barlow, as a volunteer with experience in operating the corn roaster, “assumed the ordinary and obvious risks of working with the corn roaster,” and HCC therefore owed him no duty. The district court further determined that the risk of Barlow’s heat stroke or shoulder injury was not foreseeable to HCC when it moved the corn roaster to the new location with no shade.
This unpublished Minnesota Court of Appeals decision affirming the district court is not noteworthy from a legal perspective but I hope it is illuminating from a summer solar perspective.