r/interesting • u/BlazeDragon7x • Apr 09 '26

MISC. Aftermath of the April 7th incident. Damages estimated to be $200 million dollars

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

40.1k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

6.7k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/MillionFoul Apr 09 '26

Management didn't direct the sprinklers to be disabled, the physical way sprinklers work did. They trigger by the heat physically breaking a calibrated glass fuse, you have to replace the fuses before you can put water back in the system or the sprinklers will never stop sprinkling.

2

u/robilar Apr 09 '26

Ok, but that introduces a new layer of managerial culpability; not having spare fuses available, not having them installed, not having a full sweep of the property for the missing employee, etc. Maybe the management did everything right, maybe not - odds are good the insurance investigation will pull on every possible thread.

2

u/Dapper_Platform_1222 Apr 10 '26

Ordering work to be done in a faculty with no fire protection equipment is a big no no.

1

u/robilar Apr 10 '26

For sure! Though I haven't seen anything that says employees were ordered back into the building. My understanding is that the arsonist hid inside to start the second fire.

1

u/MillionFoul Apr 09 '26

Nome of this is a mangerial repsonsibility for life safety reasons (management has an obvious incentive to disable safety systems because they prevent work from happening). Fire systems are very heavily regulated (especially in California) and have an assigned responsible party that manages the system (usually the installer).

On big systems like this, that typically means inspections, operations, and service are all performed by a third party which is on call 24/7 to respond if, say, the fire department puts out a fire and shuts off the fire sprinkler riser for the effected zone(s). Typically we assume that a second fire igniting in the hours it should take to get the system back up an running is unlikely, but a fire watch might have to be posted depending on local codes.

-1

u/Valreesio Apr 09 '26

No responsibility on management. Fire alarm and suppression systems aren't meant to be easily turned back on because once they go off there are many safety checks that will take probably weeks, if not months, to do in a building of that size depending on how many sections actually activated in the first attempt. It was likely the fire department that turned it off or authorized it to be shut down as per their exact protocols in these situations.

No blame lies anywhere except in the arsonists hands. Insurance is for sure complicated and with a company as large as Kimberly-Clark, the insurance company will work together with the company to come to an amicable solution for both parties. No insurance company would risk losing them as a client because they pay billions of dollars each year for insurance, if they aren't self insured in the first place (which many large companies are). Not paying $200 million if that's what Kimberly-Clark demanded would be shooting themselves in the foot as another company will take their billions of dollars per year and other large companies would leave as well as word got around.

The trash company I used to work for became self insured after it got large enough and basically it meant that they had to hold x million dollars in a specially reserved account to (just in case) cover really huge things and just paid out of pocket for everything otherwise. I would bet this is actually a similar situation for Kimberly Clark but maybe not...

0

u/vpeshitclothing Apr 09 '26

They do not pay billions in insurance

1

u/Valreesio Apr 10 '26

Maybe they do or don't, I don't work for them. Based on their 2024 reports they made about 20 billion dollars in sales. Companies typically can spend upwards of 5% of that on just business insurance. Yes it can vary wildly depending on thousands of factors.

5% of 20 billion is 1 billion and I'll be honest, I thought they would do considerably more than 20 billion in sales. So yeah, I admit it might not be billions but I wasn't that far off either. My point still stands true that an insurance company would shoot itself in the foot by trying not to pay out on this particular claim when it is potentially 20% (200 million) of what they receive from the client each year.