A 30-year old man crashed his bicycle on a jump at a City of SeaTac park. The man could not move, and was not discovered until the following day. He was rushed to a hospital where life-saving efforts resulted in the puncturing of his lung. Tragically, the man suffered vertebra fractures and is a quadriplegic.
The City had opened the park to the public for recreational use without charge. The City did not create or maintain the dirt mounds commonly used by cyclists for jumps.
The man sued the City of SeaTac. The trial court dismissed the claims against the City, applying the recreational-land-use statute, which grants immunity to landowners who hold their land out for recreational use free of charge.
The immunity granted by the statute does not apply if a hidden (“latent”) defect causes injury. The jump in question had an S-shaped approach that more experienced bikers would have realized slows the bike, creating risk of not clearing the mounds.
The trial court held the lay-out of the mounds may have contained a risk hidden to those who choose to jump bicycles, but the condition itself was open and obvious (“patent,” in legal terms) and therefore statutory recreational-land-use immunity still applies – meaning the City is not liable.
The trial court distinguished previous appellate cases that found hidden defects prevented application of statutory recreational-land-use immunity.
In one such case, a five-year-old girl drowned when she was riding her bicycle along a road with an eroded edge. The eroded edge was hidden under several inches of muddy water, and the road edge abruptly dropped off into a field that was covered by several feet of flood waters. Because the road edge and drop off were hidden and the road was created by the governmental entity, the Court of Appeals overturned dismissal based on statutory recreational-land-use immunity.
In contract, the City of SeaTac did not create or maintain the dirt mounds, nor were the mounds hidden in any way.
The trial court dismissed the bicyclist’s case against the City of SeaTac. The Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal.
By Travis Eller, Seattle personal injury attorney