It's always tragic when somebody gets injured, or dies.

Still, one has to wonder how much of the responsibility should be placed on the
manufacturer and how much should be assigned to the subsequent owner (s) lack
of maintenance when the failed fuel tank is
*twenty-five years old* (!). An old fuel tank can be fine- but everything
manufactured has a reasonable useful life and once that life has beed exceeded
it should become
more incumbent on the boat owner to make periodic judgments about its continued
use.

Probably never occured to the boat owner that the fuel tank might need
replacing. How often do we ever replace fuel tanks in the family car, pickup,
or other motorized conveyance?

If the boat had been recently purchased and surveyed, the owner would have
known about the leaky fuel tank and it would have been tougher for the
plaintiff to say that Silverton should have installed a fuel tank that couldn't
or wouldn't rust out after 25-years.

It's another good reason to encourage a buyer to get a survey when you sell a
boat.
It's easy to assume that the owner must have owned this boat a long time, or
had such a survey. If that were not the case,
it's likely a recent seller would have been named in the suit with some claim
that the seller "knew, or should have known" that the fuel tank was ready to
fail.

It's important to disclose any known defects at time of sale, but when the
buyer hires an independent surveyor it takes a lot of heat off the seller. It
can be effectively argued that in the end the buyer made a final purchasing
decision based on the recommendations of his own, hired expert
rather than on representations made by the seller. The seller is still
responsible for things the seller knew about- but the survey helps insulate the
seller from stuff that jumps up, (surprising everybody), and bites the buyer on
the butt.