Common Reasons Weather-Related Slip and Falls Are Common in Bonita Springs
From late May through October, the slip-and-fall calls we get from Bonita Springs follow a season. Most come in the early afternoon, right after the daily thunderstorm rolls through. The caller is almost always describing the same moment: walking from a parking lot into a store, or from a pool deck back to a unit, or down a tile breezeway, and one shoe went out from under them. By the time they get to us, an MRI has shown a herniated disc or a torn rotator cuff, and the property’s insurance adjuster is already calling with an offer to “take care of the medical bills” if they sign a release.
I want to walk through what we actually see in these cases, and what Florida law requires of the property owner — because the rules are not what most people think.
For the last twenty-five years, in addition to practicing law, I have held a Florida real estate broker license, and that broker work has shaped how we read property cases. When I look at a slip-and-fall in a condo association, a strip-center storefront, or a hotel pool deck off Bonita Beach Road, I am not only thinking like a lawyer. I am thinking about lease structures, common-area maintenance obligations, the inspection schedule a reasonable owner is supposed to keep, and which entity actually has the duty to clean the spot where my client went down. That second hat changes how we work these files.
What Florida law requires of a property owner
Three statutes do most of the work in weather-related fall cases in Florida.
Section 768.0755, Florida Statutes — transitory foreign substances in a business. If you slipped on something like rainwater tracked into a grocery store entryway, a spilled drink in a restaurant, or a freshly mopped tile floor at a hotel, this is the statute that applies. The burden is on the injured person to prove the business had actual knowledge of the wet condition, or that the condition had been there long enough that a reasonable business should have known. Plain English: a puddle that sat there for twenty minutes while three employees walked past it is a very different case from a puddle that appeared thirty seconds before the fall.
Section 768.0710, Florida Statutes — negligent maintenance and structural conditions. This is the one we use for the cracked sidewalk, the loose paver, the rotted wood step on a rental cottage, the missing handrail on a pool deck, the algae-covered shell path through a condo community. These are not transient spills. They are conditions of the property itself. The owner does not get to plead ignorance the way a grocery store can with a spill — the law expects them to maintain what they own.
Section 768.075, Florida Statutes — duties to invitees, licensees, and trespassers. The duty owed depends on who you are. A customer walking into a Publix off Bonita Beach Road is an invitee and is owed the highest duty. A friend visiting your house is a licensee. A trespasser is owed almost nothing. Most weather-related fall cases we handle are invitee cases.
If the fall happened on government property — a sidewalk maintained by the City of Bonita Springs, a county park, a courthouse breezeway — section 768.28 drops a different set of rules on the case: a written notice requirement, statutory caps on damages, and a much shorter window to act. We treat those cases differently from day one.
Factors a court considers
Whether the defendant is a grocery store, a condo association, or a hotel, the practical questions a Florida jury ends up working through are usually the same:
- How long had the wet or hazardous condition been there before the fall.
- Whether the property had a written inspection or cleaning schedule, and whether anyone actually followed it that day.
- Whether prior complaints or prior incidents had been logged about the same spot.
- What the lighting and visibility looked like at the moment of the fall.
- Whether warning signs, mats, cones, or non-slip coatings were in use, and whether they were appropriate to the conditions.
- What the injured person was doing — were they distracted, were they wearing reasonable footwear, were they somewhere they were invited to be.
Those last items get folded into Florida’s modified comparative fault rule. Since 2023, if a jury finds the injured person more than fifty percent at fault, they recover nothing. That single change is why insurance defense lawyers spend so much time on what the customer was doing in the seconds before the fall. We spend just as much time on what the property owner was not doing in the hours before.
The trivial-defect doctrine — why it is not as clean as it sounds
You will sometimes hear an insurance adjuster wave off a sidewalk-lip case by saying the height difference is “trivial” and therefore not actionable. There is some history behind that. Florida courts have long recognized that very small defects, often described as under about an inch, are usually not enough to support a claim on their own. But it has never been a bright-line rule, and it is not a free pass.
What courts actually look at is the totality of the circumstances. A three-quarter-inch lip in a freshly painted, well-lit driveway in the middle of the morning is one thing. The same three-quarter-inch lip in a dim breezeway, covered in wet leaves after a tropical storm, with two prior complaints in the property manager’s email folder, is another. We have had cases where the height difference was modest but the surrounding facts — lighting, foreseeability, prior incidents — pushed the case well past any trivial-defect defense. The defense gets argued in nearly every premises file. It is rarely the end of the conversation.
What we see most in Bonita Springs
Bonita Springs has its own pattern, and it is shaped by the geography. The areas off Old 41 and Imperial Parkway are dense with strip centers, restaurants, and grocery stores where the tile-floor-plus-rainstorm combination produces a steady run of cases every summer. The hotel and resort corridor along Bonita Beach Road sees pool-deck and lobby falls almost year-round. The condo and country club communities — Pelican Landing, Bonita Bay, Spanish Wells, and the smaller associations off Imperial — generate a different kind of case: algae on shaded sidewalks, slick pavers around clubhouse entrances, loose handrails on pool stairs, shell paths that turn into a skating rink after a humid morning.
Most of our Bonita Springs slip-and-fall clients live within fifteen minutes of our Windsor Place office at 3525 Bonita Beach Road, Suite 107. Many of them are retirees, which matters medically — a fall that a thirty-year-old shakes off in a week sends a seventy-year-old into surgery. Insurance carriers know this. They lean on the comparative-fault argument harder when the injured person is older, because they expect the soft tissue and disc damage will be more serious and the claim will cost them more.
One that turned on surveillance footage
One case I think about: a Bonita Springs grocery store, mid-afternoon, summer. Our client was an older shopper who had just walked in from the parking lot. She rounded the end of an aisle and went down hard on a clear liquid that had pooled on the tile. No cone. No mat. No employee in sight. She tried to catch herself with her right arm and felt the kind of pop in her lower back that everyone over fifty knows is bad news.
The imaging came back showing a herniated lumbar disc. On the liability side, we moved fast on the surveillance video. Stores routinely overwrite their footage on a seven-to-thirty-day loop, and if you wait to ask, it is gone. We sent the preservation letter the same week.
What the footage showed mattered. The spill had been on the floor for more than twenty minutes before our client fell. During that window, multiple employees walked past the puddle. Nobody mopped it. Nobody put down a cone. Under section 768.0755, that is exactly the kind of constructive-knowledge proof the statute calls for. The case settled for a significant figure once the carrier saw the video and the medical record together. She did not need surgery, which was the outcome we wanted.
The lesson I draw from that file, and the dozen others like it we have handled, is that the liability evidence has a shelf life. The footage gets overwritten. The witnesses scatter. The puddle dries up. If you wait, you lose tools.
What a property owner is supposed to be doing
Having spent twenty-five years as a Florida real estate broker in addition to representing injured Floridians, I have seen first-hand what a property owner’s reasonable safety obligations look like from the inside.
A reasonably prudent commercial property owner in Southwest Florida — a grocery store, a strip-center landlord, a hotel, a condo association — is supposed to be doing a few things consistently:
- Running a written inspection schedule that covers the high-traffic walking surfaces — entryways, lobbies, pool decks, stairwells, parking-lot walkways — and dating each inspection.
- Treating the rainy season as a foreseeable hazard, not a surprise. Mats inside every entryway, cones staged near the front, and a documented protocol for who deploys them and when.
- Pressure-washing or treating walkways that are prone to algae and mold, particularly on the shaded north and east sides of buildings and around pool equipment.
- Logging every incident, every complaint, and every near-miss in writing, then acting on them. The same slick paver that produced a complaint in March and another in April is going to produce a lawsuit in June.
- Reviewing lease and CAM (common-area maintenance) obligations with their tenants so that nobody is pointing at the other party when a customer goes down on a common walkway.
When we pull discovery in a Bonita Springs premises case and the inspection logs are blank, or the CAM responsibilities are murky, or the same hazard appears in two years of board meeting minutes, we know what kind of case we have.
What to do if you fell
This part is practical, and it is the same advice I have given to clients in the office on Bonita Beach Road for thirty years:
- Ask for the manager. Ask them to write up an incident report and ask for a copy before you leave. If they will not give you one, write down their name.
- Take pictures with your phone — the wet spot, the shoes you were wearing, the lighting, the absence of any cone or mat, the surrounding aisle, and any cameras you can see on the ceiling or exterior.
- Note the time. Note who was working. Get names and phone numbers of any witness who saw the fall.
- Tell the manager, in writing if you can, that you want the surveillance video preserved. A text to a friend recapping the conversation is better than nothing.
- Get checked out medically the same day. Disc and shoulder injuries often feel manageable in the first hours and then announce themselves at three in the morning.
- Do not give a recorded statement to the property’s insurance company before you have talked to a lawyer. Their adjuster is trained to ask questions in a way that locks in a comparative-fault narrative.
- Call our office. The first conversation is free, and if we take the case there is no fee unless we recover for you.
Key Takeaways
- Bonita Springs slip-and-fall cases cluster around the rainy-season pattern from May through October — wet tile entryways, pool decks, and algae-covered walkways do most of the damage.
- Florida’s premises law splits along two main statutes: section 768.0755 for transient spills in a business, and section 768.0710 for the property’s own condition. Which one applies changes how the case is built.
- The trivial-defect doctrine is not a bright-line rule. Lighting, prior complaints, and storm debris can turn a small defect into a real case.
- Surveillance footage has a short shelf life. The single most valuable thing an injured person can do in the first week is get a preservation letter out.
- A reasonably prudent property owner runs a written inspection schedule, treats rainy season as foreseeable, and logs every complaint. When those records are missing, the case usually tells itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a Bonita Springs store have to put out a wet-floor sign every time it rains?
Florida law does not say a store must place a sign for every drop of water. Section 768.0755 requires you to prove the business knew about the wet condition, or that the condition had been there long enough that a reasonable business would have known. A puddle by the front door during a four o’clock thunderstorm with no mat and no sign is very different from a single drip somebody tracked in thirty seconds earlier. The longer the condition sat, and the more obvious it was, the stronger the case.
What happens if I slipped on algae on a pool deck or a shaded walkway in a condo community?
Algae and mold on pool decks, shaded sidewalks, and shell-covered paths are common in Bonita Springs because of the humidity. Those cases are usually argued under section 768.0710, which deals with negligent maintenance of the property itself. The questions a jury asks are practical: did the association or the property manager have a cleaning schedule, did they actually follow it, and had anyone complained before. We have pulled board meeting minutes that mentioned the same slippery spot for months before our client fell.
I tripped over a cracked sidewalk after a storm. Isn’t that a small defect the property owner can ignore?
There is an older idea called the trivial defect doctrine that says very small height differences, often described as under about an inch, are not actionable. It is not a bright line, and Florida courts look at the whole picture: how the area is lit, whether the defect is in a high-traffic walkway, whether prior people had complained, and whether storm debris was hiding it. A three-quarter-inch lip in a brightly lit driveway is one case; the same lip on a dim, leaf-covered path after a tropical storm is another.
What should I do in the first hour after I fall in a store, hotel, or parking lot?
Ask for the manager and ask them to write up an incident report, then ask for a copy. Take photos of the spot you fell, the surrounding area, the lighting, and the shoes you were wearing. Note the time. Look for cameras and tell the manager in writing that you want the footage preserved. Get names and phone numbers of anyone who saw the fall. Then get checked out medically the same day, even if you think you can walk it off. Disc injuries often show up a day or two later.
How long do I have to file a slip-and-fall claim in Florida?
For falls that happened on or after March 24, 2023, the statute of limitations for general negligence claims is two years. Older falls may still be governed by the prior four-year window. If the property is owned by a city, county, or other government body, section 768.28 adds a written-notice requirement and a much shorter clock. The safest move is to call a lawyer in the first week, before evidence like surveillance video gets overwritten.
Talk to our office before the video gets overwritten
If you fell at a store, restaurant, hotel, pool deck, or condo walkway anywhere in Bonita Springs, Fort Myers, Naples, Estero, Cape Coral, or Lehigh Acres, call our office at 239-992-8259. The first conversation is a free consultation. There is no fee unless we recover for you. The single most useful thing we can do in week one is get a preservation letter out to whoever owns the property, before the surveillance footage rolls off the system. Do not wait.
About the Author
A more-than-thirty-year personal injury practice from the firm’s Windsor Place office on Bonita Beach Road has been the daily work of David B. Pittman, Esq., founder of Pittman Law Firm, P.L., with a sustained focus on personal injury and premises-liability cases. Bonita Springs is home for the firm, and most of its child-pedestrian, premises, and family-injury cases come from the residential corridors off Old 41 and Imperial Parkway, the school zones around the Bonita Beach Road corridor, and the surrounding Lee County neighborhoods.
From The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina to the University of South Carolina School of Law, David’s preparation has been deliberate. Martindale-Hubbell rates him AV-Preeminent; he is a member of the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum.
David has held a Florida real estate broker license for twenty-five years, a credential that shapes how the firm reads the property side of premises cases. The firm handles personal injury cases across Lee and Collier Counties, serving Fort Myers, Bonita Springs, Naples, Cape Coral, Estero, and Lehigh Acres, with offices at Windsor Place in Bonita Springs (main) and Fort Myers (satellite). Call 239-992-8259 for a free consultation.
The information on this website is for general information purposes only. Nothing on this site should be taken as legal advice for any individual case or situation. This information is not intended to create, and receipt or viewing does not constitute, an attorney-client relationship. Past results do not guarantee a similar outcome in any future matter.