Overwise

BACKGROUND

The facts relevant to this lawsuit are largely undisputed. The accident at issue occurred at a Vons supermarket located in Pacific Palisades. The entrance to the store is on the west side of the building. There is a seven-foot, nine-inch wide concrete sidewalk, running south to north, in front of the store; the sidewalk abuts an asphalt roadway and parking lot. Along the western edge of the sidewalk, where the sidewalk abuts the roadway, there is a three-foot wide yellow strip of “truncated domes” (a patterned mat that is required by the California Building Code to provide a detectable warning to the visually impaired of the boundary between the sidewalk and the roadway). The sidewalk is level with the roadway directly in front of the entrance to the store, but the roadway gradually slopes down

2 to the south and north, creating a curb along the sidewalk. The warning strip extends south along the gradually increasing curb until the curb reaches its full height of approximately six and a half inches, and extends north until the curb reaches a height of approximately three inches. The curb is painted red, although the warning strip covers most of the top of the curb. At…