Frederick M. Hueston, PhD  

Stone Care Consultant 

I was on my way back from an inspection and noticed a kid next to me on this lonely, two lane highway, texting. I pulled up beside him and beeped my horn, but he did not respond, he was so engrossed with his phone.     

I slowed down so he could pull ahead me, in the hopes of maybe getting his attention. Before you knew it, there was a red light with someone stopped. Well, you guessed it; he smacked right into the stopped car. He didn’t even see it in time to stop.   

Now, this is not a story about texting and driving, but the ironic thing is, just as I passed this accident my phone rang and the caller on the other end was an attorney. He asked me if I could perform slip measurements on a marble floor in a major hotel. I told him that I could not only do the slip readings, but can also do an entire safety audit if he liked.  

He proceeded to tell me that he represented the hotel and a lady fell at the top of a stair landing, fell down the stairs and broke several bones. He told me that the lady claimed the floor was slippery. 

Well, I hear this all the time and people are always suing over slips and falls. As a matter of fact, it is the number one lawsuit in the country. Since the hotel was only a few hours away, I told the attorney I could be there the next day.   

I hung up the phone and just shook my head. I must be getting old ’cause all I could think of is how people are using the legal system for financial gain. Most of the time, at least in my experience, it’s their own darn fault. Whatever happened to responsibility? We are suing fast food restaurants because we are fat, tobacco companies for giving us cancer. Where does it all end? 

OK, sorry about that. Let me get back to this story. I arrived at the hotel the next day. This was a very high-end luxury hotel. The marble floors were all white Carrara with granite inserts. The floor was perfectly flat and had what I call a ten foot shine. My first thought was that the floor was so shiny that people in general think shiny means slippery. But this is not always the case.  

I did a quick walk around the lobby before heading to the front desk to meet with the hotel manager. I really didn’t see anything out of place. There were lots of people walking across the floor and no one seemed to be slipping. I could wait to take some readings. 

I walked over the front desk, told them who I was and who I was there to see. Just as the clerk picked up the phone, a tall, and I mean tall guy, almost 7 feet, came toward me. For a minute I thought he might be an NBA star. He walked up to me and said, “You must be the slip guy.” Now, that was a new one. I’ve been called the stone guy but never the slip guy. 

He proceeded to tell me that this lady fell sometime during the night and no one really witnessed the fall, so there wasn’t much to go on. I asked him to show me where she fell so I could take some readings. He pointed to a series of stairs around the corner from the front desk and said, “Right there.” 

I walked over to the stair landing, set up some safety cones and took out my slip meter. I took numerous readings, both wet and dry, and they all fell into a COF of 0.5 or higher. For those of you who don’t know, COF stands for Coefficient of Friction, and anything higher than a 0.5 is considered safe.  

Now, the problem with slip readings is that they are only good for the instant you take them. So it is possible that the floor could have been slippery at the time of her fall. But there was no way to prove otherwise … or was there?  

I picked up my meter, removed the cones, and sat down in the lobby to make a few notes. I was in one of those daydream moods and was staring into the distance when I noticed something on the ceiling of the hotel lobby. It was a surveillance camera. All of sudden, a light bulb flashed in my head. 

I got up and made a beeline over to the front desk and asked to speak to the manager again. “Lurch” came back out and asked me if I was done. I told him, “Yes and no. I noticed you have surveillance cameras in the hotel. Are they operational?” 

He told me, yes, that they are on constantly and they do record everything 24/7. I asked if I could see the tapes the night the lady fell. He looked at me and said, “That’s a great idea.”  

He took me to the control room which reminded me of a control room at NASA. He asked the nerdy-looking guy behind the control panel to pull up the tape from the night the lady fell. As he loaded the tape, I couldn’t help but think why they didn’t look at this tape to begin with. I guess that’s why they hired me (LOL).  

“Here it is,” he said. 

Sure enough, there was this lady walking toward the stairs and guess what she was doing? Yup, she was texting on her phone.  She continued to walk toward the stairs, with her head buried in her phone and she hits the steps and falls head over heels. I couldn’t wait to call the attorney to tell him. This will be a slam dunk case.  So, not only shouldn’t you text and drive, you also shouldn’t text and walk.

The Stone Detective is a fictional character created by Fred Hueston, written to be entertaining and educational. He has written over 33 books on stone and tile installations, fabrication and restoration and also serves as an expert for many legal cases across the world. You can send any email comments to him at fhueston@stoneforensics.com