On June 14, 2018, what started out as just another night of fun and amusement at the Daytona Beach Boardwalk turned into a nightmare of fear and pain for 10 amusement-goers in a roller coaster. The ride, dubbed the “Sandblaster” was going through another circuit of the rollercoaster tracks when the unexpected happened. The front car completely derailed from the tracks.
When a preventable injury occurs as a result of environmental factors, this is what is known as premises liability. It means that there was a basic safety responsibility that the property owner was legally required to maintain, and then failed to do so. Inadequate lighting in stairwells that causes a fall is one example, but security on a property can be another. But how does security “fail?” When is security doing all it can, but still failing to achieve its objective, and when is security not fulfilling its legally required obligations?
To some it is considered just a punchline in a joke, or an excuse by greedy people to exploit insurance money from honest businesses and homeowners. But others, slipping and falling in a home or public space is not just a clumsy, embarrassing mishap, it can have very real medical repercussions that can affect a person for months, years, or even permanently. Slipping and falling while out in public or visiting someone else might not seem like such a serious incident, especially when compared to something more dramatic like a car accident. But the human body has a lot of vulnerabilities, and a slip and fall accident can cause a variety of different medical problems depending on the type and severity of fall.
There is a particular type of lawsuit that is well known even in public circles amongst people without any expertise in law. The general category of such lawsuits is called “premises liability.” What it means in more practical terms is that someone has a professional and legal obligation to make a space safe for people, and if there is a failure in that responsibility that results in injury, then the injured people may take those property owners to court to sue for damages.
Natural gas may not be quite as high in public awareness or popularity as electricity, but it is still an incredibly valuable resource that modern society relies on quite a bit. When properly handled, natural gas can do everything from let us cook, dry our clothes, heat our homes and, at an industrial level, even allow companies to generate the electricity that we use. So in actuality, there’s quite a lot of natural gas that gets pumped around, even in a state like Florida that doesn’t necessarily use it extensively in furnaces for heating purposes.
There’s the old saying that “a man’s home is his castle,” which is just a fancy way of saying that when you own your own home, you have certain legal rights as a homeowner that the law will observe and use to protect you. People cannot just come into your home without permission, or ignore your requests to leave, should you make them. People cannot break into your home with the intent to take your belongings for themselves, or to harm or injure yourself or other residents.
One of the great things about the American landscape is that for people looking for good value, there are wealth of older structures all over the country that just need a little bit of time and attention in order to be restored into something that may be beautiful, useful, historical or in some cases, all three. Plenty of Americans take advantage of the numerous existing, older properties around the country to acquire a new home, or a new workplace, or other facility.
