Angela Lim Seok Im v Tampines Town Council and others

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Judge: Loo Ngan Chor
• Judgment Date: 06 August 2019
• Neutral Citation: [2019] SGDC 164
• Court: District Court (Singapore)
• Docket Number: DC/DC Suit No. 2227 of 2014
• Published date: 05 February 2020
• Year: 2019
• Hearing Date: 11 March 2019,12 March 2019,01 July 2019
• Plaintiff Counsel: Mr. Raeza Ibrahim, Mr Jonathan Cheah (M/s Salem Ibrahim LLC) -
• Defendant Counsel: Mr. Ramasamy K Chettiar (M/s Central Chambers Law Corporation) -
• Subject Matter: Tort,Negligence,Duty of care,Breach of duty,Contributory negligence
• Citation: [2019] SGDC 164

District Judge Loo Ngan Chor:

I set out my full reasons for the decision I made in this matter, for the purpose of the cross-appeals by the Plaintiff and the second and third Defendants. Where I refer collectively to the second and third Defendants, I shall use the phrase “the Defendants”.

The claim against the first Defendant had been discontinued so that my decision did not concern the first Defendant.

On 5th August 2011, at about 3pm, the Plaintiff, then 32 years old, was walking along the corridor of the Tampines Mart, on her way to Giant Supermarket, with her boyfriend, Mr Chee Jin Cheng (“Chee”), slightly ahead and to her right, when she suddenly slipped and fell. She landed hard and painfully on her behind, and suffered injuries which she later ascertained to include a fracture in her sacrum at the S4/5 junction with a 4mm posterior displacement.

When she landed, she touched the floor and felt the presence of oil where she sat.

With help from Chee, she made her way back to Chee’s nearby flat to rest. Her clothes, including her soiled jeans, were cleaned. Later, when the pain did not subside, she was sent to hospital.

The third Defendant owns the Tampines Mart, which includes a privately-owned wet market. It is a subsidiary of the second Defendant which operates the market.

As a wet market, the stalls there sell raw and pre-cooked food, dried goods, provisions, fruits and vegetables. No cooking is allowed within the wet market, neither, as a matter of policy by the National Environment Agency, nor by the Defendants¹. In the nature of a wet market, the floor is often wet from watering by stall holders or melting ice; this is a matter of common experience. The Defendants placed importance on the wet state of the wet market. I do not think that the Plaintiff disputes this because she is no stranger to a wet market. There are few known falls in a wet market perhaps because visitors know to walk with measured paces and careful balance because of present slip risks.

Chee went back at about 3 plus pm to check the fall location and take photographs. Whilst there, he was seen by a former technician (Mr Hasdi Bin Johari) of the Defendants and told him briefly of the Plaintiff’s fall. Mr Hasdi reported this conversation to Mr Chia Choo Lim (“Chia”), a senior manager of the second Defendant, the Defendants’ only witness. Chia, whose office is located at another place, went to the wet market that evening to inspect the general area where the Plaintiff fell. He found it unremarkable.

The Plaintiff’s pleaded case is that the Defendants have a duty to lawful visitors to ensure that the wet market is operated “in a safe and proper manner so as not to cause danger”, and in particular, to ensure that “its corridor is not oily”. She pleaded that the tenant of a stall she walked past had occupied an untenanted stall on the other side of the corridor, which “resulted in the corridor being oily”.²

It is not disputed that the Plaintiff has not produced any physical evidence which distinctly – directly or inferentially - shows the presence of oil on the floor. Her jeans had been washed as she had not expected then that her injuries were anything more serious or other than the pain she felt during the fall. The photographs taken by her boyfriend were adduced but they do not distinctly show the presence of oil on the floor. However, they do show the presence of gas cylinders, two huge pots atop stoves and someone engaged in stirring one of the pots.³ Whilst Chia maintained that he saw no fire or any actual cooking from the photographs, I am prepared to infer that there was in fact cooking going on at that stall which was meant to be untenanted and vacant.

The Plaintiff’s point is that the oil on which she stepped and caused her fall was a splatter which was invisible when she walked onto it. She only knew of its presence when she felt the presence of oil after falling down.

Whilst the available materials are scanty, several things are clear, which are bases enough for me to accept that a splatter of oil caused the Plaintiff’s slip and fall. The Plaintiff did suffer that fall while Chee just ahead of her and to her right did not. Unfortunately, she had taken a route just outside the stall where cooking was improperly going on, stepping on the first two tiles⁴ which slightly sloped down to the flat corridor. The stall had no enclosures unlike in a hawker centre. The Defendants’ employee, Mr Hasdi, had admittedly seen Chee at the wet market taking photographs and, upon asking, invited Chee to report the fall to the management. (As an aside, I should add that I took no account of metadata (which, the Plaintiff said would have shown the date and time when Chee took these photographs) appearing on several photographic exhibits⁵, owing to the metadata having been withdrawn⁶ in the face of objections by the Defendants.) The Plaintiff and Chee did write to her MP an emailed letter dated 20th August 2011⁷ about the incident, which was signed off by Chee for and on behalf of the Plaintiff. In this letter, the Plaintiff’s complaint was that the wet market floor was oily and caused her to slip and fall.

I should address an issue concerning the letter and Chee’s evidence, which the learned Defendants’ counsel, Mr Ramasamy Chettiar, broached. In his supplementary affidavit of evidence-in-chief, Chee said that when he returned at 3.40pm on the same day to the fall location, he noted that the cooking “made the floor around #01-03 very oily and grimy. I know this because I reached down to touch the floor.”⁸ In the said letter, however, in apparent reference to this visit, it was stated that “By this time, the stall owner had promptly washed and cleared the area of grease and oil, presumably recognising our complaint that it had posed as an extreme form of danger to unsuspecting pedestrians.” In this regard, I accepted Mr Raeza Ibrahim, the learned Plaintiff’s counsel’s contention, that this apparent inconsistency was a result of the Plaintiff’s having misunderstood Chee when she drafted the letter which in fact contained a “dual voice” of what they separately knew of the fall and the fall location.⁹

The type of cooking that was going on in the untenanted stall, adjacent to the corridor on which the Plaintiff fell, was, I think, capable of causing the oil splatter which the Plaintiff says caused her to slip and fall. I found that it did probably cause the oil splatter.

The Defendants’ Defence is that they owed the Plaintiff no duty of care or that, if they did, they did not breach the duty.¹⁰ In addition, they had no knowledge of the incident and put the Plaintiff to proof that the patch of floor was oily.¹¹ In any case, amongst other points, the Defendants pleaded that they had “used all reasonable means to ensure that [the wet market] was reasonably safe for use in that the entire premises is cleaned twice a day, once in the morning and once at night towards closing time.”¹² They also maintained they had appointed an independent cleaning contractor, ABM Century Pte Ltd (“ABM”). They did not receive any report of the cleaners having had to clean an oil patch. Neither had they received any complaint about anyone else falling down.¹³

The Defendants also pleaded that in the nature of a wet market, the floor is expected to be wet.¹⁴ As noted above, I think that the Plaintiff did not dispute this or that one needs to exercise care walking in a wet market. Although the appurtenant part of the Defence was denied, the Plaintiff’s Reply was that “While it is reasonable to expect the floor of a wet market to be wet at times, it is not reasonable for it to be oily/greasy at any time. An oily/greasy floor is much more slippery than a wet floor.”¹⁵ It is noteworthy that the complaint before me was really not about a wet floor causing the Plaintiff to slip and fall.

In my view, it cannot be seriously disputed that the Defendants have a duty of care to visitors to take reasonable steps to ensure that the wet market is safe for their use. The Spandeck [2007] 4 SLR(R) 100 principles clearly apply. Factual foreseeability, as a preliminary requirement, is a low factual test, i.e., that the Defendants’ negligence might result in harm to persons like the Plaintiff. An occupier’s liability to a lawful entrant satisfies the first requirement of proximity, as per the See Toh Siew Kee case [2013] 3 SLR 284. I see no public policy...