After narrowly dodging a dangerous chunk of falling ice while Christmas shopping in the Loop, I was not consoled by news reports urging Chicagoans simply to accept this as an unavoidable “act of God.” God did not create the ever-higher, flat-roofed skyscrapers that threaten death and serious bodily injury to pedestrians. The human choice of an architecture that features sloping glass roofs and inclined glass walls is not an act of God.
Architectural alternatives do exist even for those landowners who refuse to use sloping roofs to prevent a deadly accumulation of ice and snow. Canadian architects have learned to use snow-rails to prevent icicle formation. These architects have also created snow-retaining devices and heat-tracing units to prevent ice and snow buildup on top of high buildings.
Unfortunately Illinois is one of a meager minority of states that holds a landowner entirely blameless for harm caused by a “natural accumulation” of snow even though a reasonable person could have used reasonable methods to prevent the accumulation.
Until our judges and legislators get serious about the lethal danger posed by snow and ice accumulation, it is only a matter of time until we have more tragic deaths.
The current practice of posting signs telling pedestrians to watch out for falling ice and snow is comically useless. Why would anyone look up while walking when doing so would increase the risk of injury to the face, falling, being run over or bumping into other people on the street? Cordoning off the sidewalks with plastic ribbon only forces pedestrians into the streets where they run the greater risk of being hit by rush-hour traffic.
The burden of prevention should not be on the pedestrians. It belongs on the businesses that reap a profit from those pedestrians and whose high-rises now pose winter death to those same pedestrians.
