The Third Department, affirming the grant of defendant property owner’s motion for summary judgment in this slip and fall case, determined the area where plaintiff tripped on a piece of pipe was not demonstrated to be an area used as a walkway. Therefore plaintiff’s use of the area as a walkway was not foreseeable:
“A landowner has a duty to exercise reasonable care under the circumstances in maintaining its property in a safe condition”… . To that end, “the scope of a landowner’s duty is measured in terms of foreseeability” … Because “[t]he risk reasonably to be perceived defines the duty to be obeyed”… , the issue distills to whether it was foreseeable that plaintiff, despite being provided with established and alternative avenues of ingress and egress from defendant’s firehouse, would instead exit the rear of the structure at night and traverse a sloped, unlit strip of land — located between the firehouse and a row of trees/shrubbery — in order to reach the front parking lot of the firehouse and retrieve his vehicle. Upon reviewing the record as a whole, we are satisfied that defendant met its burden of establishing, as a matter of law, that plaintiff’s means of egress was not reasonably foreseeable and, further, that plaintiff failed to raise a triable issue of fact on this point. Kirby v Summitville Fire Dist., 2017 NY Slip Op 05652, 3rd Dept 7-13-17
NEGLIGENCE (FORESEEABILITY, PLAINTIFF’S USE OF AN AREA AS A WALKWAY WAS NOT FORESEEABLE, DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT PROPERLY GRANTED 3RD DEPT)/SLIP AND FALL (FORESEEABILITY, PLAINTIFF’S USE OF AN AREA AS A WALKWAY WAS NOT FORESEEABLE, DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT PROPERLY GRANTED 3RD DEPT)/FORESEEABILITY (SLIP AND FALL, PLAINTIFF’S USE OF AN AREA AS A WALKWAY WAS NOT FORESEEABLE, DEFENDANT’S MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT PROPERLY GRANTED 3RD DEPT)