32 THE QUEENS COURIER • NOVEMBER 15, 2018 FOR BREAKING NEWS VISIT WWW.QNS.COM
A WINTER WALK
Q: One Winter day, I was walking on a sidewalk alongside a County
road. A pile of accumulated snow was obstructing the sidewalk, and so I
needed to walk on the roadway. There I was struck by a car.
A: Quite possibly, the County’s negligent plowing of snow created this
obstruction of the sidewalk – exposing you to the danger of walking in the
roadway.
The County is likely to contend that its negligence, if any, was not
the ‘proximate cause’ of your accident – for example, that the acts of the
driver intervened between the County’s conduct and your injury, severing the
‘causal connection’. However, an intervening act does not constitute a superseding
cause sufficient to relieve a defendant of liability unless it is (a) extraordinary
under the circumstances, (b) not foreseeable in the normal course of
events, or (c) independent of or far removed from the defendant’s conduct.
Seemingly, the driver’s act in hitting you was a natural and foreseeable consequence
of the County’s negligence.
Presumably, the County has enacted a ‘prior written notice statute’.
Unless an exception applies, the County may not be subjected to liability for
injuries caused by an improperly maintained street or sidewalk unless it has
received written notice of the defect. Because the County’s snow plowing
operations caused snow to be deposited onto the sidewalk, an exception
applies: the County itself created the defective condition through an affirmative
act of negligence.
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