Defendant Hillside Estates, Inc. owned and managed Winding Woods Apartments in Sayreville, New Jersey. Plaintiff, Hsi Rung Niu-Wang, was a tenant in the complex. After plaintiff left her apartment to go to work, she walked towards her car and fell on black ice in the parking lot. The issue in Niu-Wang v. Hillside Estates, 2024 N.J. Super. Unpub. LEXIS 1436 (App. Div. July 3, 2024) was whether defendant apartment complex owner could be liable for plaintiff’s injuries because they failed to pre-treat the apartment complex’s walkways and parking lots in light of the knowledge of an impending storm.
This apartment complex consisted of over 130 buildings with separate parking lots for most of the buildings. Plaintiff was a resident in one of the buildings. The day before her accident, the National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory for Middlesex County, warning the residents about a freezing rain “with the potential to cause ice accumulation on sidewalks, roads, and bridges in affected areas.”
In the early morning hours of the day of her accident, freezing rain coated parts of the complex’s exposed walkways and parking lots with a thin layer of ice. Defendant apartment complex conceded that they did nothing to prepare the walkways and parking lots for the storm beforehand. Furthermore, they did not take any steps to address the icy conditions of their walkways and parking lots after the freezing rain began.
At about 7:45 a.m. on the morning of her accident, as the freezing rain continued to fall, plaintiff left her apartment to go to work. She walked towards her car with one foot on the grass and another on the walkway. When she eventually stepped onto the parking lot, she slipped on a patch of black ice, falling and breaking her left ankle. There was no dispute that the black ice that caused plaintiff’s fall was formed that morning when the drizzle froze as it hit the ground. There was also no dispute that plaintiff’s injury occurred during the freezing rainstorm.
The defendant apartment complex filed for a summary judgment dismissal, which was granted. The trial court judge found that there was “no independent duty that should be imposed upon commercial landlords to anticipate weather events and plan against them.” The trial court judge ruled that the issue was dealt with in the Pareja v. Princeton International Properties case where the NJ Supreme Court specifically rejected a duty to pre-treat when it adopted the ongoing storm rule.
Nevertheless, plaintiff appealed the trial court decision and contended that defendant owed her a duty of reasonable care to maintain the parking lot in a reasonably safe condition. She argued that the trial court judge misapplied Pareja because “the ongoing storm rule does not preclude the imposition of liability based upon defendant’s lack of action prior to a storm.” Plaintiff contends that the ongoing storm rule in Pareja did not address whether defendant had a duty to have salted or sanded the parking lot before the storm began.
The Appellate Division rejected this argument. It noted that the NJ Supreme Court, in adopting the ongoing storm rule, concluded that a commercial tenant had a duty to address snow and ice accumulations in the parking lots and pathways only after a reasonable time following a storm. Moreover, the Appellate Division noted that the Pareja court specifically rejected “the notion that all a landlord needed to do to avoid liability was spread salt.”
In the case within, the facts were not disputed, such as that there was no ice or precipitation present before the storm. On the contrary, it was conceded that the ice formed during the storm.
The Appellate Division found that it was bound by the NJ Supreme Court’s Pareja precedent that “commercial landowners do not have the absolute duty, and the impossible burden, to keep sidewalks on the property free from snow or ice during an ongoing storm.” More specifically, the Appellate Division noted that in adopting the ongoing storm rule, “the Supreme Court specifically declined to exclude liability where landowners had actual or constructive knowledge of an impending storm.” Hence, the Court affirmed the trial court decision, dismissing the lawsuit.
