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SLC Attorney To File Lawsuit Against Polaris For ATV Fatalities

In the last year in Utah, three people - all women - have died after their Polaris ATV caught fire. 

The second and third deaths occurred on September 2 on the Hells Revenge trail above Moab. Two Arizona women were in a Polaris Ranger that tipped, and sheriffs say burst into fierce flame “within moments, almost spontaneously.” Onlookers were not able to get to the women before they perished in the fire. Salt Lake City attorney Jeff Eisenberg plans to file a lawsuit against Polaris on behalf of the families, and it’s not his first case.

“We got involved with the Polaris issue about a year and a half ago, on a case involving a young girl who had been very very severely burned while her family was operating a Polaris RZR utility terrain vehicle.”

And that’s another Utah case that has held national attention - it was the first fire-related death on a Polaris ATV, on a model that was recalled a few weeks later. 15-year-old Baylee Hoaldridge, from Spanish Fork, was burned over 65 percent of her body after the vehicle tipped and quickly caught fire in American Fork Canyon. She survived for four months in the burn ward before succumbing.

At least 160 Polaris fires have been reported to date, along with numerous severe burn injuries. Polaris has recalled 160,000 vehicles, dozens of different models, for fire hazards, advising owners to “stop driving immediately.” Eisenberg says Polaris has had years to fix the problems.  

“If you look around, vehicles are not just catching on fire and burning to the ground rapidly, this is a very unusual and dangerous problem. Anyone who has one of these vehicles needs to understand that if a fire starts, and I know that they have started both with vehicles that have tipped over, and vehicles that have not been tipped over, but if a fire starts, you have seconds to get off that vehicle, and prevent yourself and anyone on the vehicle from being at great risk for burn injury. These fires, at least the ones I know about, once they start, they consume the vehicle very very quickly.”

The Polaris engines are known to run hot, and they are close to the plastic gas tank. Recall fixes have involved adding shielding, and fixing various fuel system parts. Polaris has also had recalls on steering, suspension, and other critical safety elements. I talked to Sean Kane, the director of Safety Research & Strategies, a prominent automotive safety group.

“There appear to be a significant number of fires with these Polaris vehicles, side by sides they’re called, the UTVs.  Frequently we see problems that occur in the design and engineering of these products, and sometimes manufacturing of them, and they don’t offer the kind of protection for an occupant in the event of a crash, and also they achieve some pretty high speeds and some pretty high capabilities, without the same kind of protections you would expect in a machine like that.”

Rachel Weintraub is the ATV specialist at the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. She says nationwide the vast majority of ATV deaths involve riding on streets and roads.

“What the arguments seem to be on the other side are increasing revenue, increasing tourism. But I think that’s an incredibly one dimensional view of this issue, and certainly the cost of injuries, fatalities is excessive and needs to be considered. I mean a lot of them are fire and fire related burns.”

Originally from Wyoming, Jon Kovash has practiced journalism throughout the intermountain west. He was editor of the student paper at Denver’s Metropolitan College and an early editor at the Aspen Daily News. He served as KOTO/Telluride’s news director for fifteen years, during which time he developed and produced Thin Air, an award-winning regional radio news magazine that ran on 20 community stations in the Four Corners states. In Utah his reports have been featured on KUER/SLC and KZMU/Moab. Kovash is a senior correspondent for Mountain Gazette and plays alto sax in “Moab’s largest garage band."