Court finds pump maker owed no safety duty in deadly fire

Two months later, workers went to swap out an empty drum of thinner. They wore ordinary street clothes, not anti-static gear. One opened the drum, releasing leftover vapors, and a static discharge set off a fire that killed two employees and severely burned a third.

The survivors and the two estates sued nearly two dozen defendants. By the time it reached the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, only a few claims against Carlisle remained: negligence, negligent infliction of emotional distress and wrongful death. On July 20, 2026, the court affirmed summary judgment for Carlisle, holding that it owed the workers no duty of care.

Under Pennsylvania law, a company performing a service can owe a duty to people hurt by careless work, but only as far as its job went. Carlisle agreed to sell, install and give basic operational training. It never agreed to run full safety training, even though plaintiffs argued it had “superior knowledge” of the hazards. So it had no broader duty.

The court was clear on where that duty sat. “The Depot may have owed its workers a duty to train them,” it wrote, an obligation the employer could not hand to an equipment vendor just because it showed them how to run the machines.

For HR, the signal is direct: a supplier’s operational training is not safety training and does not shift the employer’s duty.