38 A.2d 681 | Conn. | 1944
The plaintiff brought this action to recover damages for injuries which she sustained as the result of a fall on a public sidewalk maintained by the defendant town. Judgment was for the defendant, and the plaintiff appealed.
The following facts were found by the trial court and are not subject to material correction. The plaintiff slipped and fell on a small patch of ice, about eighteen inches in length and twelve inches in width, which had formed in and had completely filled a shallow depression in the walk about three-eighths of an inch in depth. The depression had existed for several months prior to the plaintiff's fall, which occurred at about 9:15 o'clock on the morning of February 19, 1942. The ice had formed in the early evening of February 18. Early in the morning on February 19 there had been a light fall of snow, which covered the ice at the time the plaintiff fell. The patch of ice had not been sanded.
The trial court adopted the plaintiff's draft finding descriptive of the locus, with immaterial variations. *241 Briefly summarized, the finding shows these further facts: The section of the walk upon which the plaintiff's fall occurred was not quite flush with the rest of the walk but was depressed at one point about three-eighths of an inch; that, because of the contours of the surrounding land, water falling or forming or flowing onto the walk could not readily drain away; and that such drainage was impeded, especially with the ground in a frozen condition, as to water accumulating in any depression or depressions in the sidewalk. It stated conclusions, among others, that the ice completely filled whatever slight depression existed and covered all the irregularities of the walk so that the surface was a smooth glare of ice upon which the plaintiff fell, and that she was not injured by stepping into a hole, but by slipping on the ice. These conclusions were warranted by the evidence and were logically reached.
The plaintiff's first contention, briefly stated, is that ground conditions at the site of the fall were such that the accumulation of water, with consequent formation of ice in wintertime, was inevitable; that the causal connection was simple and direct because, although the ice which filled the depression was a proximate cause of the injury, the long-existing depression, slight as it may have been, was the cause of the ice upon which the plaintiff fell, and that the defendant was liable. We held that this claim was unsound in Agriesto v. Fairfield,
In effect, our decisions hold that to make a municipality liable for a failure to use reasonable care to prevent or remedy a condition in the highway of such a nature that it may in the future be the producing cause of a different condition, which in turn will cause injury to a traveler, would limit the common-law rule of immunity for negligence in the performance of a governmental duty further than the statute justifies. Rogers v. Meriden,
The plaintiff's second claim is that, even if the ice was the proximate cause of the fall, it constituted a defect of which the town had implied notice. The court found the contrary. The test as to implied notice is fully stated in Ritter v. Shelton,
The second count of the plaintiff's complaint alleges nuisance. The claim is not stressed in her brief. The court found that the conditions existing at the point where the plaintiff fell did not constitute a nuisance. This conclusion cannot be disturbed. Beckwith v. Stratford,
There is no error.
In this opinion the other judges concurred.