Philadelphia to Pay Nearly One-Third Million in Municipal Liability Verdict

(Newswire.net — September 14, 2015) Philadelphia, PA — On August 5, 2015, twelve jurors in the City of Brotherly Love awarded $301,600 to a woman who suffered a wrist injury due to the City of Philadelphia’s negligence. The 12 jurors found that the city was liable for the single woman’s injury because of failure by the city to take reasonable precautions against falls by pedestrians.

 

As a result of falling at the site of excavation done on a city street and extending to a nearby Commonwealth highway, the woman, a professional typist, suffered a fracture to her non-dominant wrist. The fracture required surgery and threatened the victim’s livelihood. As the sole caregiver to her elderly mother, the plaintiff depended on her income as a typist to provide for herself and her mother. The incapacitating wrist injury meant she could not type or generate an income while convalescing. 

The plaintiff’s attorney Bruce Martin Ginsburg from Ginsburg & Associates demonstrated that the city failed to produce permits for any utility to perform a digging on the city street for a period of time extending back almost two years before the fall. The city hotly contested the case, claiming first to have no records of its own Water Department performing excavation starting on the city street and extending to the state’s highway adjacent to the Water Department’s manhole cover. The city additionally attempted to shift blame to the injured plaintiff. 

Despite the city’s attempt to claim ignorance for the digging and to blame the pedestrian for not exhibiting due caution while walking in a crosswalk which the City painted over within months of this tragic fall, the jury clearly felt the city was responsible for maintaining its streets not only for the efficient flow of vehicular traffic but for the safe movement of pedestrians. 

City and Municipal liability are a difficult area of civil law because often the plaintiff is, as in this case, a single individual struggling against the combined resources of a major city or municipality. Yet one of the rights every citizen of every city has is to expect safe passage in public spaces. When a city or municipality fails to safeguard its own streets—when it neglects to fulfill its city and municipal liability to its citizens—and one of its residents is harmed by that negligence, very often the only recourse is to pursue a municipal liability lawsuit against the local government.

 

 

Local governments typically shield themselves from city and municipal liability issues simply by erecting signs, warnings and barriers when the necessary work of maintaining streets, waterworks, and other utilities renders streets and sidewalks unusable. Often a chain of responsibility begins high within a city’s agencies and extends down to the workers at the job site. Every link in that chain, in recognition of its city and municipal liability, has a duty to protect the city’s citizens as well as expedite the work.  Further, by statute the State and cities are insulated from responsibility unless certain “exceptions” are met that allow private citizens to sue for their injuries.

The city’s residents come to expect safety measures designed to caution them about open ditches, broken sidewalks, diggings and excavations. When those reasonable precautions are not in place, many times accidents result through no fault of the pedestrian involved. 

 

Safe passage on city sidewalks and across city streets is a reasonable expectation, and a local attorney specializing in city and municipal liability can help safeguard your rights when that reasonable expectation is undermined by a governing body’s negligence. Ginsburg & Associates helped the plaintiff in this case and is ready to help you. The firm has extensive experience representing pedestrians injured crossing defective streets, being struck by vehicles or navigating faulty sidewalks.