Articles Posted in Negligence

Under Louisiana law, store owners are required to exercise reasonable care to keep their stores free from conditions that could be hazardous to customers and visitors. When a customer is injured while browsing the aisles, the merchant’s efforts to maintain a safe premises are often given great scrutiny. To win a negligence suit against a merchant for an injury that was due to an unsafe condition of the premises, the customer is required to prove the following three elements: (1) the condition presented an unreasonable and foreseeable risk of harm to the customer; (2) the merchant either created or had notice of the unsafe condition; and (3) the merchant failed to exercise reasonable care to remedy the condition.

On the element of notice, the customer/plaintiff has two options. She can show “actual notice,” which requires her to prove that the merchant had specific knowledge of the dangerous condition (usually occurring when the condition had been previously reported to a store employee). Alternatively, the plaintiff can rely on “constructive notice” if she can show that the condition existed for such a period of time that it would have been discovered if the merchant had exercised reasonable care (normally proven by showing that the store failed to regularly clean/go through the store looking for problems).

The analysis of the constructive notice issue was of central importance in the case of Gregory v. Brookshire Grocery Co., No. 45,070 (Ct. of App. La., 2d Cir., 2010). On October 21, 2003, Lena Gregory entered the Brookshire Grocery Store in Farmerville. Just prior to her arrival, a young girl had become ill and vomited in several places around the store as she attempted to find the restroom. Gregory noticed the vomit on the floor near the entrance to the store and carefully made her way around it. Approximately 15 minutes later, as Brookshire employees cleaned up in other areas of the store, Gregory slipped and fell on a spot of a “clear substance about the size of a baseball.” It was unknown what the substance was, whether it was related to the girl’s sickness, how it got on the floor, or how long it had been there.

On November 25, 1984, a natural gas pipeline running through a field in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana exploded, causing the loss of lives and substantial property damage. The pipeline was owned by the Texas Eastern Company, but the land over which the pipeline ran was owned by Mary Lou Trawick Winters. Nearly thirty years prior to the incident, Mrs. Winters had agreed to provide Texas Eastern an easement to “construct, lay, maintain, operate, alter, repair, remove, change the size of, and replace pipe lines” on the property. Dupree v. Texas Eastern Corp., 639 F. Supp. 463, 464 (M.D. La. 1986).

Relatives of the parties injured in the blast filed suit and named Ms. Winters as a defendant because of her ownership of the land over which Texas Eastern’s pipeline was run. The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana first examined the state laws related to the granting of easements, and noted that “there are literally thousands of miles of underground natural gas … pipelines in Louisiana. It is a rare southwest Louisiana rice field that does not have at least one pipeline crossing it–many have multiple pipelines.” The court also observed that under federal law, natural gas pipeline companies are permitted to expropriate property needed for running the lines. In other words, landowners can be required to grant easements on their property for the installation of pipelines so long as the gas company compensates them based on the fair market value of the easements.

Although the court noted that pipeline easements are typically established by “voluntary” agreements between the pipeline companies and the landowners, it concluded that as a practical matter landowners are in no position to decline the request to grant an easement when “asked.” Revealing clear sympathy the position of such landowners, the court concluded, “the chances of the courts of Louisiana holding a landowner liable for activities of the [gas company] over which the landowner had no control, are akin to those of the proverbial snowball in the warm place.”