A primary school teacher is suing adventure playground company Go Ape for £60,000 after shattering her leg on a slide “aimed at children” as young as three.
Rosemary Mountain suffered a “severe” fracture when her trainer get caught and her leg was “dragged round behind her” whilst coming down a 10 to 12m long “Big Bounce” netted fabric tube slide at Go Ape’s Black Park adventure site near Slough in February 2019.
The 50-year-old was left with a leg broken in so many places it was “floppy” after the accident on the slide in the site’s Nets Kingdom area, which Central London County Court heard was designed for three to 12-year-olds.
Mrs Mountain, who teaches year one and two, is now suing Adventure Forest Ltd, trading as Go Ape, for about £60,000 over her injuries, claiming the slide – which was later replaced – was “too dangerous” and “not reasonably safe for operation.”
But Go Ape are denying all blame and insist there was nothing unsafe about the Nets Kingdom, which was “installed by industry specialists” and regularly inspected for potential hazards.
Lawyers for the company also say that Mrs Mountain signed a disclaimer accepting that she was at risk of injury before she went into the Nets Kingdom.
The court heard that Mrs Mountain was on a half term visit to the Black Park Go Ape with her husband and her young children in February 2019 when the accident happened.
In the witness box, she described the accident, telling the court that the family had decided to leave the area and go home, using the slide as the most convenient exit, with her husband and kids going first.
“I went down with my legs together,” she told Judge Luke Ashby.
“It was very fast and the first part is just a freefall. My foot just got snagged in some sort of material at the side of the slide and dragged behind me. I came to a rest and it was twisted right round.
“My trainers caught in the fabric of the slide about three quarters of the way down. You are not really sliding on it, you are just dropping.
“Somehow it got snagged on the side. I kept moving and it broke horribly.
“I felt it snag and get caught on something. I was moving fast and it was dragged around behind me.
“My foot and leg were dragged underneath me as I fell and I knew I had badly broken my leg because I could feel intense pain and see that half of my shin was bent at about 45 degrees.
“I could see that it was broken because it was in a flexible curve round behind me. It was just wobbly. When I came to a rest, I just thought ‘my kids can’t see my leg like this’.”
After the horrific break, she had to be cut out of the netting at the bottom of the slide before being taken to hospital.
She told the court she had previously been an “outdoorsy adventurous person,” but after the leg break had to undergo extensive surgery, remains plagued by chronic pain and is unlikely to ever return to running or her previous “active lifestyle”.
David White, barrister for Go Ape, said Mrs Mountain had signed a disclaimer before entering the course, telling her: “As with any physical activity, there is a degree of risk…this was an activity which involved the risk of suffering injury and you knew that when you agreed to do it.”
She replied: “I’ve seen Go Ape a lot of times before. We signed to say there’s a risk of bumps and scrapes, but not this sort of injury.
“It says on the description that it’s suitable for three-year-olds, so I didn’t expect to break my leg in the way that I did.
“I know it says it’s risky, but it didn’t look risky and it said it was for young children.”
Mrs Mountain added that she had been down the slide once already before her accident.
“It wasn’t slippy, it was unpleasant. You had to crawl out of the bottom, you didn’t slide out. I feel the slide was not a safe design. I felt it was a very strange slide.
“I just thought here’s a fun activity for my children to do at half term. But looking back afterwards, it just didn’t feel like it was safe.”
Dave Daborn, co-owner of Go Ape and site manager at the time, confirmed Mrs Mountain’s barrister’s assertion that “this was an area which was aimed at children.”
“Our target market was under-12s, but older children and adults were welcome,” he said.
Presenting her case, Mrs Mountain’s barrister Jonathan Payne argued that the type of extreme injury she suffered should not have occurred “on a slide which was reasonably safe for operation”.
“If the claimant is doing as she has been instructed and despite this she suffers an entrapment injury which breaks her leg in three places, the piece of equipment is not reasonably safe for operation,” he said.
He added that, looking at accident reports relating to the slide, there was a common theme of “trapping and twisting lower limbs,” making the accident Mrs Mountain suffered foreseeable.
Adding that Go Ape had failed to carry out a specific risk assessment of the section of slide where Ms Mountain suffered her injury, he told the court: “even if the piece of equipment is reasonably safe for most users, if the injury foreseeable is for serious injury – which it was – and the cost of modification is comparatively low, then she should not have been exposed to that risk of injury.
“The accident statistics showed there was a propensity for users to trap their lower limbs – however this was caused.
“In those circumstances, there was a foreseeable risk of serious injury, which was evidenced by this accident in February 2019.”
Go Ape later removed the net slide and substituted a rigid one in its place.
However, in denying fault, it insists its engineers had in fact carried out a “specific risk assessment” and that there was nothing inherently hazardous about the slide.
Go Ape barrister, Mr White, labelled what happened to Mrs Mountain “an extremely unfortunate accident,” but said her evidence about the sequence of what happened was unclear.
The safety briefing handed out to her was clear and comprehensive, he told the court, and her core complaint seemed to focus on the overall safety of the slide where she was injured, he argued.
“In reality therefore, the only allegations remaining are generic ones about the overall ‘safety’ of the slide – or one about the slide being too high or steep,” he told the court.
“Her case is thus, in essence, that the slide was simply too dangerous per se, owing to its height/angle, such that it simply should not have been there at all,” he pointed out, arguing that this claim was “not reasonably sustainable”.
