Tips to Avoid Slip or Fall Situations
The Motley Fool is no fool. If you’re a visitor to their website you know that they cover all things financial and in a recent article they provide some advice for landlords on how to prevent slip and fall injuries in their buildings. The Fool, of course, is concerned mostly with the economic impact on a landlord should one of their tenants or visitors be injured due to their negligence. For a slip and fall attorney like me, however, the focus is more on the injured parties then property owners. Regardless, the intent is the same: preventing what can be potentially life-threatening accidents.
Slip and fall signs are a frequent sight in orange county
The duty of a landlord or a property owner to keep his or her property as safe as possible falls under the umbrella of “premises liability,” which I detailed here on this website. I won’t go into great detail again about this area of the law but in short, premises liability means that all property owners have a legal obligation to keep their properties in good condition and free of anything that might potentially cause harm to anyone who lives on or enters that property. Indeed, they need to anticipate what could potentially cause injury on their property and take steps to alleviate the potential for injury. Failure to take steps to make sure the property safe amounts to negligence and those instances where negligence contributed to a slip, fall or other injury is when a personal injury attorney enters the scene, helping a client to prove in a court of law that the property owner was in fact negligent and contributed to the injury of the attorney’s client.
Because slips and falls can have devastating consequences with concomitant large awards for plaintiffs, property owners have a double incentive to keep their properties safe. If the life, health and safety of those who enter a property are not incentive enough, the prospect of a legal decision against those property owners should be. It’s a case of an ounce of prevention being worth more than a pound of cure. As an injury attorney I find it, shall we say, at the very least interesting, that so many property owners continue to be negligent and contribute to the injuries of the people who visit or live on their properties.
Liquids: Ever-Changing Factor in Slips and Falls
The Motley Fool lists 12 items that landlords can address so I won’t repeat all of them here, however even if every potential hazard has been addressed by a landlord, one factor that often changes is spills. Especially for properties such as supermarkets which carry many liquid products, or in which customers may bring their own food items, the potential for spills as always high. It’s incumbent on the property owners to make sure that those spills are cleaned up as quickly as possible. It’s no wonder that you’ll see on many slip and fall attorney websites—including this one—the use of an image with a wet floor sign.
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As the Motley Fool points out (referencing statistics by the Centers for Disease Control), it’s the older population that is more at risk for injuries from falls so it’s doubly important to make sure things such as spilled liquids are cleaned up as quickly as possible especially on properties which cater to senior citizens. Older or younger, slip and fall injuries can still be very serious matters. If, by reiterating some of the steps property owners can take to secure their properties, I can in some way prevent further injuries, so much the better. However, if you do experience a slip, fall or trip resulting in injury which was caused by the negligence of the property owner, please call the law offices of Kyle Scott at 714-544-1460 and let us evaluate your case.