There are as many ways to become injured by a gate as there are types of gates. Whether the gate was part of a residential or commercial property, hotel, hospital, themed attraction, or penal institution sally port, malfunctioning gates have been the reason for all types of personal injury and wrongful death claims.

Personal injury and wrongful death cases are sometimes caused by defectively operating products associated with a multitude of problems. Some are caused by damage created by outside forces such as vehicular impacts or adverse weather conditions. Others are due to improperly maintained sliding or swinging car barriers or overhead apartment complex garage portals. Many are directly related to unprofessional service providers failing to understand required equipment problems that were later the cause of a claim. Other claims have proven to be the fault of the person injured. Each claim has been completely different, yet share many of the same types of related common component issues.

The most important part of investigation into the injury is to be able to thoroughly evaluate the gate, related parts, and service provider involvement. Sometimes the gate and operators have been removed, destroyed, or lost. In those cases, photographs and videos of the incident are all that is left to be analyzed. In some claims, as a result of years of neglect, gates have become disconnected from their tracks, welds have broken, or the gates have fallen apart and on to someone. In other claims, the electric gate operators have imparted severe forces to turn an otherwise well maintained gate into a potentially fatal weapon. Deferred or improperly maintained gate operators missing critical safety devices have failed to protect users from impact injuries. Some injuries have occurred due to abuse of some kind by the party now making the claim.

Gates and their associated operators have the potential to become deadly.

In the case where a small child was crushed behind a moving gate, it was because the gate had an improperly operating closer. No safety devices were ever installed with this system, as the contractor that had provided the equipment had opted not to plug in a couple of required modules, due to his lack of understanding of what the modules did.

In another case, there was no adjacent on/off switch near the gate. In one case, a workman was trapped and ultimately crushed between a stone wall and the Electric Gate Maintenance Fiorida when the gate mechanism was activated from a remote location. Ironically, the worker was the son of the man that had installed the gate several years earlier. No disconnect switch was ever provided because the installer was not aware that a local disconnect switch was required.

Gate & Fence Service Providers

Having examined thousands of pages of deposition testimony related to gate injury and wrongful death claims, it is often discover that the local gate service provider is insufficiently qualified to perform the required evaluation or preventative maintenance and lacks the knowledge of the systems installed. The subject gate operator installation was merely an adjunct to his normal scope of business which is installing yard fencing materials or other landscape products.