Family may appeal `low' award for stress

The couple awarded £19,427 in damages arising from two dishwasher fires spoke yesterday of the "awful trauma" visited on the family in the wake of the accidents in 1989 and 1992.

Mrs Yvonne Byrne praised yesterday's Circuit Court judgment but said she and her husband had been "floored" by how little compensation had been awarded, and were considering an appeal.

"The judgment was excellent in some respects but the amount of compensation is unbelievable given what we've been through," she said.

Mrs Byrne said the judgment followed a separate award of £13,500 earlier this year to her daughter, who was seven years old at the time of the first fire and seriously traumatised by the experience.

"For 10 months afterwards, I didn't go out of the house because she was afraid of being left alone. She was like my shadow - even sleeping in the bed with me at night."

Both fires occurred in the kitchen at night - Mrs Byrne was using the dishwashers at night in response to advertising campaigns promoting the economy of night-time electricity. The first was discovered by her son, who came home late and smelled smoke, which had already leaked into bedrooms upstairs.

After the fire, they replaced the dishwasher at their own expense, buying another Bendix "because I was familiar with it". They claimed on the house insurance for the immediate damage but not, Mrs Byrne says, for smoke damage. "This was a mistake, because the smell of smoke was everywhere in the house and we had to replace most of the soft furnishings over the next two years to get rid of it."

Three years after the first incident, the new dishwater caught fire. By now, Mrs Byrne was "paranoid" about fires and, one night, insisted they check what she thought was a smell from the kitchen, where they found "smoke sailing along the ceiling". The fire was contained within the appliance, with plastic dishes melted onto the element. "But we had had gas central heating installed in the meantime and there were gas pipes running behind the dishwasher. The insulation at the back of the dishwasher was stuck to the pipes".

After the second incident, they visited the company responsible for maintenance, Elektro Services, and were given a sympathetic hearing, she said. But a subsequent letter from the company "took a different tone" and the matter was thereafter dealt with through legal channels, culminating in yesterday's judgment.

Mrs Byrne still has a dishwasher but now never uses it at night. She moved appliances, including the washing machine, to a shed at the end of the garden: "I never again want to run the risk of burning my home down just by turning on a switch."

A spokesman for Electrolux Ireland, which now owns EID Appliances and Elektro Services, declined to comment on any details of the case.