The High Court has dismissed a woman’s personal injury action over a fall at a caravan park in Tralee, finding that the cable connected to her caravan did not amount to an unusual danger and that she could reasonably have avoided it.
Mr Justice Coffey delivered judgment on 4 June 2024. The claim concerned an accident on 14 July 2018, when the woman fell near a services post while walking to fill a kettle. She fractured the lower end of her left upper-arm bone and injured her left thumb.
The woman and her husband had stayed at the park about 20 times between 2011 and 2018 and were familiar with its layout. Their pitch was on a curve, leaving its electricity and water post farther away than was typical. The court found that their orange cable, joined to a black extension cable borrowed from the defendant, ran about 13 metres from the post to their caravan.
The woman’s engineering expert argued that the distance to the post created an unacceptable tripping hazard and suggested that posts could be placed closer to pitches. He accepted that an exposed cable would still be needed to connect a caravan to a power source. The judge found that the woman was not exposed to an open cable for 16 metres, as the expert had suggested: the likely point of contact was within about a metre of the post.
The judge found that she knew where the post and cable were. She approached the post by walking around her husband’s car and across the grass, stepped over the cable to reach the tap, and then returned by the same route. The court inferred that the cable caught around her right ankle close to the post. It accepted the defendant’s engineering expert’s view that the hanging portion of the cable was more likely to have caused the entanglement than a flip-flop catching beneath cable on the ground.
Applying section 3 of the Occupiers’ Liability Act 1995, the judge concluded that a connected cable near a services post was a feature a visitor familiar with the park could expect. He found that the risk could have been avoided by stepping over it. The court therefore found no breach of the defendant’s common duty of care and dismissed the action. The judgment records no damages award.