Prophetic slogan!
A woman who competed in a radio station’s contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner’s office said Saturday.
Jennifer Strange, 28, was found dead Friday in her suburban Rancho Cordova home hours after taking part in the “Hold Your Wee for a Wii” contest in which KDND 107.9 promised a Nintendo Wii video game system for the winner.
“She said to one of our supervisors that she was on her way home and her head was hurting her real bad,” said Laura Rios, one of Strange’s co-workers at Radiological Associates of Sacramento. “She was crying, and that was the last that anyone had heard from her.”
It was not immediately known how much water Strange consumed.
Who is dumber? The nutcases who think up a contest like this — or the sad fools who take part?
I’ll nominate this lady for a Darwin Award.
Up front It seems to be a tough call. But the dead girl, liability-wise, could have reasonably expected that the radio station would not have enticed listeners into engaging in an activity that was potentially lethal. She might not have been Mensa material, but many, if not most, adults don’t realize they can OD on H2O, so she wasn’t particularly stupid, either.
The station, on the other hand, we must assume to have a legal staff, or at least retained counsel, to advise management on, among other things, the station’s exposure to liability claims arising from their promotions and contests, and If so, either said counsel was derelict in failing to advise management to research the safety of the activity they were planning for listener-contestants to engage in in order to minimize the station’s exposure, OR station management failed to consult with counsel on the aforementioned liability issue. So:
Liability: the station, 90%, the contestant, 10%.
Darwin awards … always this ignorant and lame excuse for schadenfreude and latent aggression.
If a man or woman leaves children when they die, they have passed on their genes, and are successful in Darwinian terms.
The radio station is a business and has an obligation to conduct business in a safe manner.
It doesn’t strike me as all-that-dumb for someone to not realize that holding your pee can be fatal. I’ve certainly never thought much about it. Who has?
Well, first, if we’re lucky, this’ll mean fewer stupid station contests and more music on the radio!
People see other people ingesting horrible things into their bodies on Fear Factor and other shows, and that helps desensitize all of us (or many of us) to the fact that we’re not all indestructible.
But, the holding your urine thing, I’m no brain surgeon, but I’m not stupid, either. I’d have never thought that it could be fatal. Uncomfortable, yes – fatal, no. Just guessing, here – the station probably didn’t warn everyone about that little bit of nastiness before the contest (provided the college intern probably running the contest even knew about it).
I’ll think about that this story the next time I have to go and I decide to hold it!!
The woman participated on her own free will. She purposely overcame her natural body functions that told her it was time to void. Yes the Radio Station started the contest, but they didn’t force her to participate, or continue to participate, or continue to over ride her body’s signal that her bladder was full. I go 90% woman and 10% station’s fault.
>> Mr Fusion — I go 90% woman and 10% station’s fault.
The problem with (nearly) absolving the station of responsibility is that any media can always get SOMEONE to kill themselves or others — even if the vast majority of their audience is smart enough not to do it, there will always be a few who will.
So, I believe this creates a greater burden of responsibility on the media outlet. Of course, they aren’t responsible for everything one of their listeners do but they must act with reasonable responsibility. It is totally reasonable to ask radio stations to only do safe promotions. But, in this case, the radio station actively ran a promotion that was fatal and they could have easily know this was dangerous with a single phone call to a doctor.
It was the amount of water she consumed that was dangerous. Lots of water causes overdilution of sodium in the blood plasma… dangerous!
from Wikipedia:
Consuming as little as 1.8 litres of water in a single sitting may prove fatal for a person adhering to a low-sodium diet, or 3 litres for a person on a normal diet.
very sad indeed.
They had a similar contest like this at Quakecon in Aug. of 2005. It was sponsored by Nvidia and they brought up 5 contestants who all had to drink bottles of water on-stage and then hold their hands on a Dell XPS laptop. The last person to keep their hand on the laptop throughout the whole show won the laptop. You couldn’t pee your pants but I saw a few of them regurgitate the water. It was a nasty mess.
Other contests included drinking a milkshake made up of a blended up fish, eating sticks of butter, and other things that could mess up your health…all for a video card.
Again, this was all sponsored by Nvidia.
70s – The drug and free sex decade.
80s – Gay music and good action movies decade.
90s – Internet and hip hop boom.
00s – Idiots on TV and Radio.
“The Darwin Awards” Web site is a sign of the times. It’s prime time for the idiots. Just look at who’s in the White House…
#10
Perhaps the 60s was the drugs and free sex decade, and the 70s the Disco decade…
#8
They should require warning labels on water bottles and your home tap. Won’t someone please think of the children! Has it been added to the list of WMDs?
Btw, what do I have todo to get a Wii? Drink a bunch of water and not piss? Im so there.
#10, 11: Disco was a blip at the end of the 80’s. I would do it like this:
60’s: Loss of innocence, best music ever (Motown) decade
70’s: Sex, drugs, best movies ever decade
80’s: Death of democracy, birth of retched excess and rap crap decade
90’s: Internet and corporate music, film and everything else decade
00’s: Rise of unprecedented presidential power, loss of control of our destiny (outside US influence) decade
We can control which crap song we listen to, which crap TV show to watch, which crap everything we buy, and so on. We select which crappy politician we elect to replace the last crappy one we elected. And so on. But ultimately, we’ve surrendered control to the corporations who make the crap, overseas business interests who own the corporations and oil, terrorists who control what we can bring on airlines, overseas conflicts which require our money rather than fix our own problems, and so on. We as individuals have very little control of anything except our deaths, but only as long as we can still hold the gun.
Happy New Year!
#8, But … ,
Would the station be responsible if they sponsored a Marathon Run event and a participant dies from exhaustion, heart attack, or heat stroke? Or if the station was giving away free tickets and someone had an auto accident on the way to the station? Or, to get slightly absurd, if the station had a marathon music contest and whoever wrote down the most songs won. The winner subsequently has an accident because of lack of sleep due to staying awake listening to the radio?
The fact that there is an enticement isn’t sufficient to absolve a person from the responsibility of knowing what their limitations are or from participating in a safe manner. It would be totally different for something like the great WKRP Turkey drop in (I believe)1978.
I do respect your opinion though. You make an intelligent argument as do several others that disagree with me.
OK, I’m confused by everyone saying “she’s stupid” when a majority of you are assuming its that her bladder burst. It wasn’t that, it was just the amount of water she drank caused her death…it can happen. So those of you who didn’t know that but still said she was stupid, what does that make you exactly?
I remember in school someone convinced the student council to call for banning dihydrous anoxide from school because it’s so harmful to life. One of the arguments used was that in massive quantities, it can kill just by drinking it. The council voted to call for the ban, then he explained they just voted to ban water…
“Consuming as little as 1.8 litres of water in a single sitting may prove fatal for a person adhering to a low-sodium diet, or 3 litres for a person on a normal diet.”
Another example of the dumbing down of our society. Both of the woman and the radio station. What happend to contests where you didn’t have to threaten your life to win?
#14:
“Would the station be responsible if they sponsored a Marathon Run event and a participant dies from exhaustion, heart attack, or heat stroke? Or if the station was giving away free tickets and someone had an auto accident on the way to the station?…”
I guess, to me, it’s like this: Everybody knows running in a marathon can kill you, and everybody knows you can get in a car accident anytime, but drowning from the inside from drinking too much water? I don’t think that’s common knowledge, and that’s what I think sets this apart from those other scenarios.
A reasonably informed person doesn’t know about water intoxication. *I* didn’t know it could kill you; I thought you could become pseudo-drunk.
Is a business/corporation EVER responsible for anything as long as the participants choose to do what is indicated? From some comments, apparently they can ask you to play with a gun pointed at your head, and are not responsible if a bullet comes out if the person did it of their own will.
But, a reasonable person would assume that the business wasn’t asking them to play with a *loaded gun*. The fact that the person didn’t check the cartridge is irrelevant, as the person was participating in a fun contest and would have assumed that they were not being asked to take a chance on dying.
Now, the radio station wasn’t actually trying to kill anyone, and we can assume that they were shocked as hell. So, lesson learned with pain, as usual, since we don’t read books anymore. We are becoming stupider as the libraries shrink and library cards are forgotten.
The woman died of ignorance on both her and the business’s parts. We might have made the same mistake. Stupidity, in the non-perjorative sense, is the only universal capital crime, as Heinlein said. The sentence is death, he wrote, and there is no appeal.
So sad.
I have an African Grey in my home office who’s perch is near a radio which stays on a lot. One of the things he has learned to say besides “ark, Brittany Spears… ark, Paris Hilton…, ark Iraq… is ark, drink at least 8 glasses of water a day, ark, too much water can kill you, ark. So, you would think a radio station or someone who listens to a radio enough to know about and participate in this contest, let alone the station’s lawyers would have picked up on the risk. Or that, maybe one listener might have been a doctor, nurse or maybe even just someone who hasn’t been off-planet the last 10 years, just walking past a radio would have heard about the contest and called in to say “there might be a problem here”. Guess stupid also “takes a village” sometimes.
Fusion, old boy –
You’re sounding dangerously like a libertarian.
In a different system of law than what we have, maybe things would be more like you describe. But in contemporary Western law, as a general rule, it is a given that individual persons versus organizations of persons differ in their relative liability.
The station had a obligation – which is firmly established in custom and legal precedent – that they, communicating as they do with large numbers of individuals, all different in intelligence, motivations, &c, have a responsibility to not mislead or misinform their audience in such a way that may cause harm. That’s a gross oversimplification, of course, but no one here would stand still for a complete explication of the body of issues bearing upon the topic of corporate liability.
What it comes down to is ‘reasonable expectation.’ The deceased had a reasonable expectation that a radio station would be responsible enough to not encourage behavior that would be life-threatening. They have a lawyer or lawyers. They are expected, by law and custom, to determine if their actions may bring about socially undesirable actions or behavior. The ball was in their court. The dropped it.
Just as, say, you buy a product. The product works for a while, then one day, it breaks. There’s no bright line established for exactly how long a given product is supposed to last before breaking, since there are too many variables, so who’s to blame for the failure, the maker or the user, must be determined on a case-by-case basis. That’s one reason why we have courts.
But if that product simply explodes and takes off your hand, when it was made to do nothing more than to shirr eggs or deflea your pangolin – well, the liability belongs with the maker, as you had a ‘reasonable expectation’ that the thing wouldn’t blow up in your hand.
And she had a reasonable expectation that a broadcaster to the public would not be so irresponsible as to encourage potentially lethal actions. She should not be expected to have assumed that a normal, commonplace – even necessary-to-life – activity, i.e., drinking ordinary water, could kill her.
This has little to do with the sort of nonsense that ambulance chasing scumbag lawyers foist off on gullible juries – like that annoying piece of shit dead-man switch now required on all lawn mowers. Everyone who buys a mower must now pay more for the inclusion of that switch. Why? Because, after uncountable millions of years of experience with power mowers, one asshole and his POS lawyer convinced a jury that it was the manufacturer’s fault for not telling him, a grown and presumably mentally competent adult, that sticking his hand into a loud, powerful machine with a razor-sharp blade spinning around might not be a very good idea. Millions of us, over decades, starting as little kids, had enough sense to know that and although accidents did happen (and still happen), the vast majority of people did not need to be told something so ridiculously obvious. But this moron got paid millions of dollars for being an idiot and shifting the blame for his idiocy to the manufacturer. And the rest of us now have to fork over our money to be protected from ourselves.
No, it’s not that kind of bogus “liability.” The station had a responsibility to not entice people into doing something seemingly benign that relatively few realize is possibly fatal. Sticking your hand in a running lawn mower is obviously dumb; merely drinking water isn’t.
Just one more reason to ban all terrestrial broadcast radio (excluding npr & pbs stations of course)
#13
I guess everything is relative, such as when and where you grew up… 🙂
#23 — and if you read and think.
#24
I was commenting on the decades, but forgot to add it… 😉 I agree with Uncle Dave on the bottom part. More happy now, Moss? 🙂
#21, Mr. Ggoti
You start out quite well and immediately I thought of SUV roll overs where the tires had been under inflated and the vehicle overloaded yet Ford was still found liable. So you have a good point.
Then it went wrong for you. The “Dead Man” switch on lawn mowers in mandated by Federal Regulation after several accidents mostly involving unattended mowers moving and injuring FEET of inattentive or distracted people.
This case has absolutely nothing to do with product liability though.
I don’t want to say the station is totally innocent, yes they will bear some responsibility. But if you read the article you might have seen this comment from a contestant.
“They were small little half-pint bottles, so we thought it was going to be easy,” said fellow contestant James Ybarra of Woodland. “They told us if you don’t feel like you can do this, don’t put your health at risk.”
The station reminded the contestants that there is some responsibility on them. The deceased ignored the warning and participated anyway. She accepted some responsibility for her action. And as few people die from over consumption of water, it was not incumbent to explicitly lay out all possible dangers the contestants might face.
The worse part of the ordeal will be the lawyers make all the money while the station and deceased are bystanders.
I thought it was widely known that overconsumption of anything can kill you.. why would water be any different?
As the former owner of a radio station, I would offer the comment the contest was not well designed. The images conveyed are urine, greed and a high tech toy. You don’t get ratings implying your listeners are cheap imbeciles in need of toliet training. That leaves the motivation for the station to be preceived as high tech.
If ‘no wee for Wii’ is the best they can dream up to convey a hip message, they are losers. As to whether the heirs and assigns have a case… you bet they do. The station will be confirmed as losers in court. I seriously doubt anyone from the Program director to the general manager ran that contest by a sentient being from the legal profession.
so, did she win the wii?
#26:
“They told us if you don’t feel like you can do this, don’t put your health at risk.”
Meh. That wouldn’t be enough for me.
I don’t think people generally don’t know that water can kill you. “Don’t put your health at risk,” doesn’t get it done. It doesn’t tell me that what I’m about to do could be fatal.
Or, better yet, what #28 said. Don’t do it at all. It’s a lousy idea. Give the Nintendo to caller #100 and play music instead.
Send the station manager an email telling how dumb he is!
http://www.endonline.com/station_content/index.php#