Walkways & Trip Hazards

I get called out to a lot of front stoops in the Fox Valley every spring, and the story is almost always the same. The steps were fine in October. By April the top slab has tilted back toward the house, there is a finger-width gap where it meets the porch, and a corner has […]

People are surprised how small a sidewalk defect has to be before it counts as a trip hazard. They picture a big broken slab. The number that actually triggers most claims and repair orders is a vertical lift of half an inch, roughly the thickness of a couple of stacked coins. I grind and replace

The brick walkway at one of my rentals looked like a small earthquake had run through it: pavers tipped every direction, a couple sunk an inch below their neighbors, one lifted enough that a tenant tripped and let me know about it in a strongly worded message. Pavers move for reasons that are completely predictable

Our first winter in the Park Hill house, I learned that the pretty snow on the front walk was also a legal obligation with a clock on it. A neighbor mentioned, almost in passing, that the city gives you a set number of hours after a snowfall to clear your public sidewalk, and that if

Across the properties I manage, more injury reports come from stairs than from any other single feature, and when I look into them, the cause is almost never carelessness. It is geometry. A step that is a little taller than the ones around it, a handrail that stops short or is the wrong shape to

A perfectly good set of steps can still put someone on the ground if they cannot see it. I spent years being called back to walkways and stairs where the surface was fine, the geometry was fine, and the fall happened anyway because at the wrong time of day or night you simply could not