Slip Risk and Mats: Writing the Liability Line Into the Event Plan

Two claims landed on the same insurer in the same season, from the same twelve metres of walkway in front of a snow display. One was a woman in heeled boots, one was a nine-year-old running. Neither of them slipped on snow. Both went down on polished tile that had been wet for two hours and had a mat on it that was the wrong mat in the wrong place.

That detail is the whole argument. When something goes wrong at a build, the question is rarely about the polymer. It is about what the floor looked like, how quickly somebody knew, and whether the plan said anything at all before the incident rather than afterwards.

Why the mat matters more than the snow

Hydrated granules track. They cling to soles, travel three or four metres, and dry into a fine grit that is more slippery than it looks, because a dry-looking floor invites a normal stride. A standard entrance mat with a rubber back holds that water and then releases it at the edges, which is precisely where people turn.

What you want at the boundary is an absorbent mat with a solid backing, long enough that a person takes four full steps on it, plus a second mat at the far side of the walkway so the same shoes get cleaned twice. Size it by footfall, not by how it photographs. A display seeing 900 people an hour needs roughly 1.5 metres of matting per metre of opening, rotated every two hours. That figure comes from watching where water actually lands on a wet Saturday, and it is always further out than the person who laid the mat expected.

What the plan should actually say

Liability language that survives scrutiny is boring and specific. Name the surface. Name the mat. Name who inspects, how often, and what they do when they find water. ‘Staff will monitor the area’ is not a control, it is a hope. ‘A named steward walks the twelve-metre walkway every 30 minutes from 10:00 to 20:00, ticks the sheet at the till, and mops with the yellow kit behind the counter’ is a control, and it costs eleven more words.

Add the drying time, because this is where most plans quietly fall apart. A floor mopped at 14:05 is not safe at 14:06. Write down the interval your flooring finish needs, and if nobody knows it, measure it: pour 200 ml on an offcut, mop it, and time how long until a sole stops leaving a print. Most people guess ten minutes. The stopwatch usually says twenty-five.

The failure that repeats

The version I see most often is a good mat in the wrong place. Somebody buys six metres of matting, lays it under the display to protect the floor, and leaves the walkway bare. The display is protected. The customers are not. Flip it: the snow sits on a sealed surface that can be mopped, and the matting goes where people walk.

Second most common: the mats are lifted at six in the evening because they look untidy in photographs. Untidy beats an incident report every time, and the photograph is not what a solicitor reads eighteen months later. If a client insists, put the mats back before the doors open and note the time on the sheet.

Recording it so the file holds up

Four photographs a day from the same spot, with the time stamp on: the mat, the walkway, the boundary between them, and the mop station. Ninety seconds of work. If a claim arrives in the spring, that set answers the only question that matters, which is whether the control was in place and running on the day in question.

Write the plan before the build, not after the first near-miss. A one-page walkway control sheet with the mat specification, the inspection interval and the photo log sits alongside the polymer snow product range, and it adapts to any venue in about ten minutes.