| Category: Shopping: Furniture |
A 40-year-old Dublin woman has told a judge that she got lost for three hours in Ikea’s warehouse at Ballymun, Dublin, after having been struck on the head by a falling flat-pack.
Hanan Tababi of Mangan Road, Dublin 8, had said it took her nearly three hours to find the exit of the warehouse after her injury.
Ms Tababi had been shopping for a chest of drawers in the bargain corner of Ballymun’s Ikea warehouse in March of 2016 when she was struck by a large box containing flat-pack furniture. She told the court she had pulled a small box towards her to check the label and a much larger box had tipped over and hit her, injuring her head and left shoulder.
The following day, she visited the emergency department of St James’s Hospital as she had been experiencing pain and ongoing dizziness as well as numbness in her left hand. Ms Tababi had lost her job in Apple as an IT technical support person as a result of her injuries.
Negligence
Ms Tababi told the court the flat-pack furniture boxes had been leaning against a wall of the warehouse like “books in a bookshelf”. She said she had been inspecting the label of a small box when a box she believed to be nearly three metres tall toppled, knocking her down to her knees. She felt this accident was a result of negligence as she claimed there had been no staff in the area to assist her, no signage to warn her of danger and no strapping holding the box in place to prevent it from falling.
An Ikea Ireland Limited representative had strongly disagreed with these statements, having said that according to the training received by every Ikea employee, any object over 1.2 metres in height must be secured by strapping and this had been the case at the time of Ms Tababi’s accident.
Judge Cormac Quinn ruled in Ms Tababi’s favour and said that whilst there had been systems in place to prevent accidents such as this one from happening, they clearly had not been in effect at the time. The case will return in two weeks time for an assessment of damages.
~ Via Irish Times |
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