Stairs/Shutterstock
A man who fell down a set of stairs while conducting a personal fire drill at his Burnaby condo didn’t come up with enough evidence to sue his strata for negligence, according to a B.C. Supreme Court judge.
On Jan. 10, 2014, James Goddard was using his cellphone to measure the time it would take him to reach the various fire exits in his Jersey Avenue apartment building, according to court documents, when he fell down a wooden exterior staircase outside of a fire exit.
He remembered putting his phone away and grabbing the railing, and, the next thing he knew, he was lying on his back at the bottom of the stairs.
Goddard launched a lawsuit in 2015, alleging the property managers, Bayside Property Services Ltd. and the owners of Strata Plan NW 289 were guilty of negligence because of the stairs and their condition.
But Goddard, according to his own testimony, didn’t know how he ended up at the bottom of the stairs, according to a ruling by Justice Kenneth Ball last Friday, and there was evidence the stairs had been properly maintained.
In his ruling, Ball said laws about negligence are there to protect people from “an objectively unreasonable risk of harm.”
“The existence of stairs by itself is not an unreasonable risk of harm, but a risk that persons in our society face on a daily basis,” Ball said. “The existence of stairs is not therefore something from which the defendants needed to protect the plaintiff.”
Ball ruled the case should be dismissed.
