Shopper hit by falling wooden sheets seeks R3.5m in damages

Pretoria – Snyman, a manager in the mining security sector, suffered severe injuries to, among others, his upper leg.

Pretoria – A Shopping trip to Builders Warehouse in Rustenburg two years ago ended in a nightmare experience for a now eMalahleni resident when wooden sheets fell onto him from a shelf.

Willem Snyman, 41, was shopping for material to make wooden frames for his wife’s beauty business. He was assisted by an employee of the store to see the code on one of the sheets.

It is said in court papers that Snyman went to the Builders Warehouse a few days prior to the incident, where he had the sheets he wanted cut into the correct size. On the day of the incident he went to the store to collect the sheets, but they were not there.

He went to show another staff member the colour of the wood he chose on the shelf. There was cut wood standing upright with his sheet of wood behind several sheets.

He told the worker that he would hold a few sheets for him to enable him to read the bar code.

The staff member apparently “paged” through the sheets, which continued loading weight onto Snyman. He tried to get out of the way when it appeared that the sheets were going to fall, but he could not.

Snyman, a manager in the mining security sector, suffered severe injuries to, among others, his upper leg.

He instituted a R3.6 million in damages claim against Massbuild, which owned Builders Warehouse, in the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria.

His lawyer, Cheri Rudd, said Massbuild offered a settlement in terms of which they would pay half of the damages which Snyman could prove that he had suffered. The parties settled the matter in terms of this agreement.

The issue of how much damages he should be awarded will be heard by the court at a date which must still be determined.

He was at the time employed at a chrome mine in Rustenburg, where he was responsible for the running of the daily operations from a security aspect of the mine. Due to his injuries and slight limp, he now finds these tasks difficult.

Rudd advised that when in a store, clients should refrain from assisting workers in removing heavy objects.

Pretoria News