Owner Liable for Injuries Caused by Faulty Pool Filter

Tenants leased a swimming pool and all the equipment associated with it to teach swimming and water safety classes. The lease made the owner responsible for major repairs to the pool equipment and the tenants responsible for cleaning and normal repairs. One day, one tenant noticed a lot of bubbles in the pool. He notified the owner about the problem, but the owner didn't fix the problem. More than five weeks later, the tenant replaced a washer on a pool filter. The next day, while the tenant was replacing the washers on the other filters, a filter lid blew off and struck his head, causing a traumatic brain injury. The tenants sued the owner, claiming that it had violated the lease by failing to repair the pool filter system.

A Washington appeals court ruled that the owner was liable for the tenant's injuries. The tenants' practice of paying a contractor to repair the pool filter system and deducting such payments from their rent indicates an understanding between the tenants and the owner that repairs to the pool filter system were “major” repairs for which the owner was responsible, the court said. So it was reasonable to conclude that the owner's failure to repair or replace the pool filter system after being notified about the problem with it was a lease violation [Breda v. BPO Elks Lake City 1800 SO-620].