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Martha Stewart Exploding: Stewart Sued Over Exploding Patio Table

Martha Stewart’s line of glass top patio table are attractive, tasteful, and apparently explosive. In Colorado, Nancy Passarella and her family were celebrating Father’s Day when they say that the table suddenly exploded — sending glass flying everywhere.

Truth be known, I have been critical of Martha Stewart after I discovered the hidden and ugly truth of her salmon roses.

Notably, after first posting this story, my father-in-law Martin Henschel told me that he had a Martha Stewart patio table and one day he came home and found that it had spontaneously exploded.

Two individuals, however, in this case were cut by glass from the table bought from K-Mart in 2008 or 2009. It appears that hundreds of people have been injured by the tables and a class action has been filed from product liability.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia released a statement:

“We take product safety very seriously. We provide the aesthetic design for beautiful products. Because we do not oversee the mechanical design, engineering or manufacturing of the products, we require all of our vendor partners to adopt and comply with product safety programs and reviews. If customers have any questions about these particular tables, they should contact Kmart customer relations at 866-562-7848.”

This aesthetic design for beautiful product may have a future with the Pentagon. We need only offer a cave over for the Taliban with a design by Martha Stewart. If we are lucky, the Taliban leadership will meet around the patio table.

Source: KDVR

Jonathan Turley

26 thoughts on “Martha Stewart Exploding: Stewart Sued Over Exploding Patio Table”

  1. come on kids, nuclear power is totally safe. I mean organic sprouts have killed more people than nuclear power (as seen in the Washington Times).

    Sit back and enjoy the show, its going to get worse. They are still 8′ away from real problems. When the water recedes we’ll all soon forget about the potential and go back to life as it was. Most people have already forgotten about the situation in Japan & assume everything is great & nobody died because the liberal media would be all over the story if anyone was even sick.

    Al Gore is fat & owns a big mansion that means there is no global warming and we need more nuclear power.

  2. BIL, OS, thanks for the reply and maps. The Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois is flooding and still rising in the east and mid-west and the water is expected to remain out of the respective banks for weeks to come. Since the jet stream still blows NW to NE with that pesky meander/loop that swings down right across my state the situation does have me concerned.

    The Mississippi is an amazing river. What was interesting about those photos was the obvious artifacts left by past meanders. The rivers previous channel and flood channels are clear. The photo of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station shows the work being done by the state or Corp to control the erosion of the banks very close to the plant. It’s good it’s on the other side of the river. Its actual size and width is apparent at higher magnifications that show the barges. It’s an awesome river.

  3. Pete, Your right about the cooling, NIMBY doesn’t apply to energy companies, except possibly to the storage of spent nuclear fuel.

  4. i believe the two main requirements for the site of a nuclear power plant are a large supply of fresh water for cooling and a surrounding population too poor to complain effectively.

    fault lines and flooding are secondary considerations.

  5. OS,

    I was thinking of Entergy’s River Bend station near St. Francisville, LA – which as the map shows is in just as bad a spot as Port. Gibson.

    http://maps.google.com/maps/place?cid=474655243849391542&q=river+bend+power+station+st.+francisville,+louisiana&hl=en&ved=0CA8Q-gswAA&sa=X&ei=Sx4ETqvzM4KQyQWHmsX9Bg

    And the Waterford Plant in Killona, just south of New Orleans – which has the benefit of not only being literally in a swamp, but in a prime hurricane path.

    http://maps.google.com/maps/place?ftid=0x8620d05a31763d23:0xb8956302cf5a4798&q=killona,+louisiana&hl=en&ved=0CA0Q-gswAA&sa=X&ei=Jx8ETrXWMaDczQWu393_Bg

    With Port Gibson (which I had forgotten about), that’s three in a row. We have some smart people in this world. It’s sad that we’re such a stupid species.

  6. Addnote: For those unfamiliar with the Port Gibson, MS area, the land is as flat as your kitchen floor. That river to the left of the site is the Mississippi, approximately a mile wide at that point.

  8. LK,

    I think the answer is in your article from The Progressive.

    “That’s one of the sillier comments I’ve ever seen, since the flooding is at record levels. And the New York Times reports that ‘water levels at the Fort Calhoun Station rose 1,006 feet above sea level Monday,’ and that the reactor ‘is protected against floods that reach 1,014 feet.’

    ‘Not everything is fine,’ says Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s energy program. ‘We’re inches away from a nuclear plant being flooded. It’s already an island. And we still have a very real possibility of flood levels rising.’

    Slocum says the operators are reaching ‘the upper levels’ of their emergency flood assumptions, adding: ‘There’s always the possibility of the situation escalating, especially when we don’t control all the variables. That’s what happened in Japan.'” [emphasis added]

    If they are only 8ft. from their peak flood planning, I can see where an air crash into a containment building or flood protection could easily cause water problems. A NFZ simply sounds like one variable they can control, so they have. I think it makes sense from a safety standpoint. Of course, the safest thing is not to build a reactor anywhere remotely near a flood plain, but they’ve got one built in a damn swamp down here so go figure. Cheap land trumps common sense apparently when you’re primarily looking for profits.

  10. Pete,

    There are only a few names I recall from that particular period of corporate looting and pillage, Linda Lay and Martha Stewart are among them. Linda Lay, Ken’s wife, sold a half-million shares of Enron stock minutes, literally, before Enron’s troubles were made public. She didn’t get charged with anything.

    Between the DotCom bubble bursting (which caused a recession as I recall) and Enron only a hand-full of people were charged or tried. Stewart in fact wasn’t found guilty of insider trading as I recall but rather of lying to the govt./obstruction of justice. Arthur Anderson did the same, he was the Ollie North of that scandal, destroying documents by the skid full.. He was sentenced to jail for obstruction but the Supreme Court overturned his conviction due to some technical issue.

    Martha Stewart may be easy to dislike but she, IMO, was a public face to put onto a big scandal so that it would look like justice was actually being done. She was the Justice Department’s beard. The attitude among the women I worked with at the time was that her prosecution was not only purely political but sexist. I agreed, It wasn’t a bunch of self-made women with some little bit (by comparison) of financial power that took the country into a recession and screwed their stock-holders and employees into bankruptcy.

  13. This reminds me of the people who bought “Donald Trump” condos only to find (after the developments went bankrupt) that The Donald had only lent his name [er, sold his name] and didn’t contribute so much as a hair.

    In either case, sadly, I don’t see how the big-name player has personal responsibility for the product. What if the seat goes out of your overpriced designer jeans?

  16. I’m not sure about a patio table whose only utility is once a year on the 4th of July.

  17. Ya got my hopes up for a moment, very misleading headline….

  18. Martha Stewart exploding? Have you seen this woman? It was only a matter of time . . .

    What’s that? It was some of her frippery that exploded? Well . . . you better keep an eye on Ol’ Martha anyway.

  20. probably didn’t leave any room for thermal expansion of the glass within the steel frame.

    Glass gets hot, tries to expand, bang no more table top. Or air is cold glass is hot steel is cooler and contracts and glass expands and goes boom.

    I don’t see how anyone could sue for a scratch and the fix is easy, make the glass a little smaller than the frame.

    I can see getting a replacement table but millions of dollars for a scratch? Come on, the only one that wins that game is a lawyer.

    Lawyer – 30 million dollars
    plaintiffs – (1) $290 Martha Stewart enhanced replacement table.
    The rest of us? We get to pay $350 for the table.

    Seems like it was worth it to me at least for the lawyer.

    Lawyer – “we protect people from predators like Martha Stewart.”

    Predator Classification:

    Martha Stewart – Phoca vitulina
    Lawyer – Carcharodon carcharias

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